The Great Escape
by WellspringCD
Summary: She's got nothing to lose, everything to gain, and she'll be damned if any Blight is going to stop her now. ** On Indefinite Hiatus **
1. Origins

_WARNING: This story is on indefinite hiatus as of August 16, 2012, for health reasons. New readers, I'm so sorry, but you might not want to bother reading a story that won't be finished for a really long time, if ever. :(_

_Rated M for violence and adult situations - things like paying rent, cooking dinner, doing the dishes. Oh, and sex. Enjoy!_

* * *

- Ten years ago

"Latitia?"

A soft cry woke me sometime after midnight, and I slipped out the bed I shared with Rica and padded barefoot to the front door. A glance through the peephole revealed a skinny boy about my age, his black hair standing out in stark contrast to his deathly pale skin, who shivered on our doorstep cradling a badly broken arm. I opened the door at once.

"Sodding arsehole," I muttered in a terse whisper as I helped the boy into a chair. "Did he break anything else or just the arm?"

He sat trembling and silent. I snapped my fingers by his ear. "Leske? You in there?"

The boy blinked and seemed to come to himself again. "Just the arm."

I poured him a glass of water and returned to the cramped bedroom to wake Rica. Rubbing her shoulder, I murmured, "Rica, Leske's got a broken arm."

"Again?"

"Yeah."

"Fine, hang on." She sat up blearily and pulled a skirt on under her nightshirt. I followed her back into our apartment's main room, where Leske waited, his round face drawn and beaded with sweat. I knelt behind his chair and wrapped both arms tightly around him to hold him still. Businesslike as usual, Rica stuck a wooden spoon in his mouth, grabbed his wrist, and yanked on it hard, setting the bone in one practiced jerk. Leske sobbed and, as soon as I released him, bent over and threw up. Rica pressed her lips into a thin line, then crouched with a sigh and started mopping the vomit off the rough stone floor.

"I'll get it," I told her. "Help me wrap his arm."

She nodded, her eyes tired, and picked up an empty dagger sheath to use as a splint, muttering, "Takes a real brave man to beat up a nine-year-old kid. You better stay here tonight, Leske. Don't go back until your pa's sobered up."

We were tying the last knots in the bandage when Mam appeared, swaying, in the bedroom doorway. "You coulda called me," she slurred.

"I didn't want to wake you, Mammy," I lied quickly. "You were sleeping so nice."

"You oughta - you oughta let me do stuff. Yer my kids. 'Is's my house."

"There was no need to bother you, Mother," Rica said calmly. "You go back to bed. Everything's fine."

Mam fell back into her bed, and after we cleaned up, the three of us followed her. Rica and I lay curled on our sides so Leske could lie across the foot of the bed and try to rest until the artificial morning returned to Orzammar.

* * *

- Seven years ago

I pulled the brush through Rica's glorious mane, enjoying the sleekness as the brilliant red hair slid through my fingers. "Do you want me to braid it for you?"

She considered it. Braided hair didn't get tangled up so much, but loose hair was sexier. "Let it stay loose this time. But put a ribbon in, OK?"

"So pretty," I murmured, gathering it briefly at the nape of her neck before tying a narrow black ribbon around her head behind her ears to keep it out of her face. "Any makeup today?"

Pain flickered briefly through her luminous green eyes. "No. I'm all out; no money to buy more, either, which is ironic, isn't it? I need to attract more customers so I can afford to buy the stuff that attracts more customers."

"We could use coal."

"Last time I did that it made my eyes all red. Made me look like I was crying."

"You don't need it anyway."

"Thanks, cookie."

I stroked her hair one more time before turning and picking up the hot iron to press her good dress. Linen was cool in the city's sweltering lava heat, but it sure did wrinkle. "Where are you going tonight?"

She paused for too long, and I turned back to direct a piercing stare at her. "You're not going to see Valeska the smith."

"We need the money and he's always up for it."

"I'll go with you."

"No. You're twelve. Go hang out with Leske."

"He's dangerous. I'm going with you."

She whirled to face me. "_No_. Don't you dare."

I turned back before the iron could scorch, which also hid the suspicious trembling in my lower lip. When I'd finished, she dressed in silence, pulled on her slippers, and left.

I wandered around looking for Leske, but his pa was in the square looking for him, too, so that meant Leske'd gone to ground somewhere. I wished he would stop trying to go home and just stay with us, where we could take care of him.

Eventually I returned home and picked up the torn trousers Seamstress Abra'd left for us to repair. We made a half-penny a patch, a pittance but the work was safe and I could do it at home. I sat on our bed to sew and had gotten halfway done when the front door slammed open and raucous laughter spilled through, interspersed with Rica's coos of faux delight.

Rica thought I was out with Leske, oh no, oh _no_... I leaped off the bed and hurled myself through the closet door, slamming it behind me - _too loud, stupid_, I cursed silently as heavy footsteps crossed the bedroom floor. The door flung open and Valeska reached in and dragged me out by the scruff, his sausage-like fingers hot and painfully tight.

"Valeska, honey, she's just a kid - let her go, and come to bed," Rica begged, hanging on his arm.

Laughing, he scooped me up, crushing me to his chest. I gasped as the smith's rock-hard arms pressed the breath from my lungs. "But she's so little and cute! How can I resist?"

* * *

- Four years ago

The pounding of drums melded with the stamping of feet and clapping of hands as all of Dust Town celebrated the feast day in honor of Paragon Varen, the first dwarf who dared to eat a nug. The town square had been draped in anything yellow we could find: Clothing, paper, brass cooking pots. Yellow was lucky; it looked like gold. I'd been dancing for an hour already by the time Leske arrived, looking sulky; I threaded my way through the crowd to greet him.

"Why the long face?" I asked, laughing and breathless.

"Bherat chewed me out again," he grumbled, then brightened when he saw the table spread with fresh-roasted nug. "Nothing a good meal won't fix, though."

"That's the Stone's own truth," I agreed, pouring myself a mug of water and draining it as he stuffed an entire nug shank in his mouth at once, stripping the tender meat off the bone with a slurp.

"Hey," he said, as soon as his mouth was clear enough to speak intelligibly. "You're wearing a dress. I haven't seen you wear anything with a skirt in – what, three years? Why the wardrobe update?"

I shuffled my feet, uncomfortable at the attention I was getting tonight, not just from him but from anyone else who knew me enough to know I'd done something out of the ordinary – which, considering the size of Dust Town, was just about everyone.

"I killed my first darkspawn yesterday," I mumbled.

He gaped. "No shit? Really? And you're celebrating by wearing a dress?"

"I'm not celebrating, bonehead," I snapped. "I decided that, if I can cut a glenlock from nose to navel, then by the Stone, I can wear a dress if I want to. I may let my hair grow out, too."

"That's perfectly logical," he nodded.

"Shut up."

"So are you going to wear skirts all the time now, like a normal girl?"

"No. I remembered I hate skirts. They're heavy and they get tangled around my legs."

Just then, Rica twirled by on the arm of a handsome lieutenant of Bherat's, beaming and with her long red hair streaming behind her. Leske groaned, his eyes following her until she disappeared again.

"Come on, Leske, she thinks of you like a little brother and you know it," I chided. "Dance with me instead. I promise not to kick you in the nuts like the last girl you asked out."

"In my defense, I did manage to make her feel so guilty that she bought me dinner," Leske pointed out.

"You're such a ladies' man." A new song started up and I grabbed his hands, dragging him out to dance.

* * *

- One year ago

"And the Paragon says, 'Silver? I hardly know 'er!'"

I concluded the joke with an obscene gesture and received a round of guffaws from my drunken audience.

"Tisha, tell 'em - tell 'em the one about piss," Leske hiccuped.

I rolled my eyes but knew which joke he meant. "So a human, an elf, and a dwarf are walking down a trail beside a stream, and they stop to take a piss. After, the human takes out some soap and begins washing his hands. 'We humans have learned how to be clean and hygienic,' he says to the others. The elf begins picking some leaves off the trees and wipes his hands with them. 'We elves use what nature has provided.' The dwarf, meanwhile, has pulled up his trousers and is already on his way down the trail. 'And our ancestors,' he calls back, 'taught us dwarves not to piss on our hands!'"

Hoots of laughter echoed through Tapster's Tavern and someone refilled my mug again. "Speaking of piss, I gotta take a leak," I excused myself, and trotted out back to pour out my unwanted mug in front of a waiting family of feral nugs, who slurped it up with enthusiasm. I smiled as the litter of huge-eyed nuglets lapped eagerly at the ale.

"Waste of ale," came Leske's voice behind me, followed by the sound of falling water.

"Gross, Leske. Piss someplace else. You know I don't drink, and you know why, too."

He tried to button his trousers and dropped them instead. "Whoops."

"That's it, I'm taking you home. You're sloshed." I pushed past him to drop off my mug and say goodbye to the others. Clinging hands entreated me to stay and play some poker, and the opportunity to fleece the drunken amateurs made me promise to return after dropping Leske at home.

He slung an arm around my shoulders as I led him down the crooked stairs to Dust Town. "Is Rica home yet?" he asked hopefully.

"Down, boy. She's not interested."

"You goin' out to the Deep Roads tomorrow?"

"Yep. Got a guy waiting for some fresh frost-rocks, and besides, I have to check the crab traps. Coming?"

"Do I look stupid? No offense," he added quickly, when I threatened to let him fall down the stairs.

I poured him into bed and turned to leave, but found Rica staggering up the walk to our apartment, her face tear-streaked and bruises darkening across one cheek. I felt my jaw tighten but hid my anger as I gently took her arm and helped her to sit in the comfy chair.

"I think we should consider Bherat's offer," I told her quietly, pressing a wet cloth to her cheek. "I don't care if he makes me work for him. Leske already does, he says it's not so bad."

"Let's wait until the bruises heal," she whispered.

* * *

- Present Day

Crime Lord Bherat slammed the door behind him, leaving a trembling Rica behind him. I put an arm around her waist.

"You'll make it, Rica. You'll get out of here soon. I'll keep him off your back until you're safe," I promised.

"I'm sorry you had to see that," she whispered.

"Don't be. I'm a big girl." I changed the subject. "You know, when he asked if anyone was interested in you yet, I saw you dodge his question. Come on, out with it: Who is he?"

Rica blushed prettily. It was one of her many talents. The woman looked like an adorable gem when she blushed. I looked like a salami, and tried not to blush in public if I could avoid it.

"I didn't want to say anything in case it's just wishful thinking," she gushed, "but there is someone. He's ... well, he's someone pretty important. Oh, he gave me the most beautiful ruby - look!" She held out an unset stone, glittering like a blood crystal in the palm of her hand. "I'm going to wrap it in wire and wear it around my neck, at least as soon as I can afford some gold wire. I don't want him to see me wearing it in some cheap metal."

"That's fantastic! It looks beautiful with your hair," I encouraged her. "So when did you see him? What did you wear? Come on, I want details!"

But before she could answer, I heard Leske hammer on the door. "Hurry up, Latitia!" he bellowed.

"I have to go," I excused myself. "I'll see if I can 'acquire' some wire for you while I'm out."

"Don't get caught," she said wearily.

"Caught? Me? Doing what? I'm a fine and honorable citizen, and I have no idea what you're talking about," I laughed, taking up my daggers and tugging a protective leather vest over my head.

Leske's summons meant Bherat had a job for us. Working for Bherat was a lot safer than treasure hunting in the darkspawn-infested Deep Roads, or at least less likely to be fatal, and he'd demanded my service as part of the payment for Rica's education. The master plan involved the lovely Rica attracting the attentions of a wealthy dwarf and getting knocked up with a boy - a girl would be useless, but if she had a boy, the dwindling noble caste would embrace him as a proper heir and also allow her to move in with them as his mother.

There had never been any question about which of us girls would get this chance. Rica was a rare statuesque beauty, tall and graceful, with a bosom that could reduce married men to tears and, as Leske put it, "an ass that won't quit." Myself, well, we'd had different fathers and little in common by way of looks. I kept my mousy brown hair cut in a functional bob, and while I shared her height and grace, I had none of her figure. I liked to call myself 'athletic,' but Leske called me a scrawny twig. I knew I was cute, and with the right attitude I could sometimes be sexy, but I would never be beautiful.

Before I left, I stopped to check on Mam. This morning, the woman who'd birthed me was draped over a chair in front of a table covered in empty bottles. I stared for a moment, and she blinked blearily back at me. Finally I sighed in disgust and turned to go.

"Try to dry out before I get home," I called over my shoulder, and closed the door before a bottle shattered against it.

Leske waited for me on the stairs in front of my home. Seeing the look on my face, he just settled in beside me as we walked across the eternal bonfire in the Dust Town square that was part cookfire, part garbage disposal, and occasional funeral pyre.

"I thank the ancestors every day that Rica is off the streets before some duster knocks her up," I burst out finally. "And also that I can finally sleep in my own home instead of being sexiled every other night because she's got a customer too ashamed to bring her back to his place. Bherat is a toad, and I hate being beholden to him, but if he gets her out of here I will gladly call him Boss forever."

Leske gave me a commiserating glance and I knew he was thinking of the several occasions when an early customer had arrived while Leske was over, and we'd had to make ourselves scarce. At first, that had meant we just went to his place, but after his pa had broken his arm one time too many, Leske had finally stopped going home. Rica'd found herself with another pair of big, hopeful eyes hanging around, attached to a hungry mouth and sticky fingers and yet another body trying to share the single bedroom.

We arrived at Bherat's front, and I shook myself physically, hoping to shed the memories as well. Talking to Bherat needed all my attention.

"Well, well, if it isn't our little dream team," he drawled. "Remind me, which of you's the girl again?"

I forced a smile. "That one," I said, pointing at Bherat. The man often enjoyed it when the people he pushed, pushed back - but not too much.

I'd guessed right, and he laughed his huge belly laugh. "You got a lotta mouth on you, beanpole. Tell me, you got enough room in that mouth for me? Oh, I forgot, that's your sister's job."

Wow. OK, that one I couldn't roll with. With a quick look at my tightening jaw, Leske jumped in. "So, Boss, you wanted to see us? I assume it wasn't just for the pleasure of our company."

"Yeah, if I'd wanted pleasure, I'd have called Rica," he leered, but when I didn't react, he lost interest in baiting me and got down to business. "The warrior caste is hosting a Proving this afternoon to honor a guest from the surface, some fancy Gray Warden. I've got a lotta money riding on a long shot called Everd, and I want you to make sure he wins at least the first round."

"How?" I asked.

"I've got a drug, here, for you to slip into his opponent's water right before the match," he explained, holding up a small earthenware bottle. "It'll slow him down, not enough so anyone will notice, but enough to give Everd the edge he needs. I got you a pass so you can go into the Proving Grounds; it's a work order what says you're supposed to clean out the latrines. Go now and find out who his opponent will be - you'll have to use your famous wit to find that out, as they usually keeps that secret until the moment of the fight."

We nodded, and I took the bottle and turned to leave. As I did so, though, Bherat caught my arm in a viselike grip.

"When I say I have money on this, I'm not talking about some pittance, like the value of _your life_. If I don't see Everd's name on the winner's list, I better not see you or your sister ever again," he growled, giving my arm a final, painful wrench before shoving me out the door.


	2. Proving Yourself

As we climbed the long and winding stairs that used the shaft of a long-dead elevator to connect Dust Town to the Commons, Leske babbled excitedly about the Provings and the Gray Warden. I had to admit, I felt a little thrill myself at the thought of seeing the inside of the Proving Grounds, and all the warriors in their finery; I was less interested in the Warden, since the only Warden I'd ever met had been one of the old, crazy ones that come down to the Deep Roads to die fighting the darkspawn, and he'd terrified me.

Nevertheless, when we finally entered the lobby of the Proving Grounds and saw the Warden himself - very obvious, standing head and shoulders above everyone as the only human in the building - and Leske fell all over himself with excitement, I said, "I'm gonna go say hi."

Leske's jaw dropped like I knew it would, and I ignored his frantic head-shaking and strode confidently up to the olive-skinned man in his splendid plate armor.

"Stone met, and blessings on your house," he said, before I could say anything, his voice as rich as butter and as strong as steel. For all my bluster, I found myself tongue-tied as I took in the full extent of his beautifully inlaid and enameled armor, exquisitely-carved sword, and, most of all, his kind and gentle eyes, set in his scarred and weatherbeaten face.

After I missed my cue, he frowned a little and added, "That was the proper greeting for an outsider when last I visited. It has been some time; has the greeting changed?"

"No," I managed, finding my tongue at last, "it's proper, I'm just surprised that you're so - well, polite to me." I suddenly wondered if perhaps he hadn't seen the brand on my face, and I tilted my head, trying to hide it without him noticing.

"I see no reason for rudeness," he said, smiling with just his eyes. "I am, after all, a guest in this city. My name is Duncan."

"I'm Latitia," I responded automatically. "It's a pleasure to meet you." I started looking for a way out of this conversation, quickly, before he stopped being so nice.

"Perhaps you have heard I am here looking for candidates to join the Gray Wardens," he continued in his sonorous voice. I swear I could listen to the man talk all day. "It's a difficult task. A good Warden is ruthless to his enemies, compassionate to his friends, and inspiring to his troops. It's a lot to ask, but I hope to find what I seek here today."

In spite of myself, I had to ask, "'His'? Are women not allowed?"

He looked surprised. "Well, yes, they are, but it is quite unusual, simply because few women willingly choose a life of war. But certainly, if the one who impresses me most today is a woman, than she shall have her chance to join our family as beloved sister. Now, I apologize for cutting our conversation short, but I have an appointment with the Proving Master." And with that, he made his graceful farewell.

Leske clapped me on the back when I returned to him, demanding a recounting of our conversation, and I obliged him as we poked around looking for someone who might know Everd's opponent. I spotted a white-bearded old dwarf by the door wearing luxurious robes, and nudged Leske, pointing him out. Leske nodded and walked up to the man, pretending to ask where the latrines were and being as dumb as possible to keep the man busy while I slipped behind him and deftly snatched the notepad from his belt. I paged through it frantically, finally spotting Everd's name and memorizing that of his opponent before slipping the notepad back into the irritated man's belt. I signaled to Leske, and he bowed quickly and scurried away before he annoyed the man so much he got himself thrown out.

"Everd's match isn't for another two hours," I told him. "Want to go grab a snack and come back?" He nodded and we went back outside into the hot, noisy Commons.

The flow of lava lent a warm, sourceless light to the entire market and kept the temperature at a steady level of almost-too-hot. We were buying some roast nug-on-a-stick when I noticed a new vendor selling interesting-looking sundries across the way. I sidled up to him and saw, to my surprise, that he wore a brand, too.

"How can you have a license to run a booth here if you're casteless like me?" I asked him.

"I'm not casteless, not really," the stout, friendly-faced merchant replied. "I'm a surfacer. Born up there, you see. Technically, I don't have a caste, so I have to paint a brand on when I come down here. I can't imagine wearing one permanently, though. Barbaric custom." He grimaced.

Fascinated, I asked, "How can a dwarf live on the surface? Isn't it terribly dangerous?"

He laughed. "You live under permanent siege from the darkspawn and you think the surface is dangerous? No, little girl, on the surface a dwarf can really be free. You can choose what life you want to lead, it's not chosen for you by your parents. It saddens me to think that the only place where dwarves live in slavery is in our own city."

Leske shouted for me to follow him, and I bid a grateful farewell to the kindly merchant, who pressed a fresh piece of fruit into my hands before I left. I stuffed it into my mouth before Leske could demand that I share it.

When the time closed in on Everd's fight, we went back inside and hunted around for his opponent. He stood by his changing room, already prepared for battle and just standing around looking menacing.

"This time, you distract him," Leske whispered to me, and I nodded. I walked boldly towards him, adding a swish to my normally businesslike walk and tossing my hair so it framed my face. I noticed him noticing me, and stopped barely arm's-length away from him, cocking my head to look at him through my lashes, clasping my hands so my arms framed my breasts. The girls need all the help they can get.

"It's so incredible to see you in the flesh," I gushed. "_Every_ girl who's ever seen you fight dreams about you, you know. It would be _such_ an honor... just to touch you."

He turned his head and spat. I flinched, because he'd turned towards Leske, but relaxed as Leske slipped into the shadows before being seen.

"As if I'd sully myself before a fight by touching some face-brand," he snorted, then paused as if in thought. "Maybe afterwards. If I win."

"I look forward to it," I simpered, but then Leske signaled to me that he had finished, so I ducked my head submissively and scurried away.

"We'd better check on Everd," I murmured to Leske as we put distance between us and our crime. "He had better win. I don't want that boar looking for me later."

We entered Everd's changing room, and froze in horror. The man had drunk himself under the table and lay snoring in a puddle of beer.

"Well, I guess we see why he's a long shot," I tried to laugh.

"What are gonna do?" Leske whispered urgently. "Bherat will kill us!"

I thought for a minute, then shook my head. "I can only think of one thing, and you aren't gonna like it."

"What _now_?"

"You need to put on his armor and pretend to be him." I knelt beside the man and started stripping off his gear. "I'll stay here and make sure no one sees him. His helmet's got a full visor, no one will know it's not him."

"What?" Leske protested. "I'm a foot shorter than he is, everyone would know. You do it."

I groaned, but the roar of the crowd echoed through the room as the last match ended. We didn't have time to think of something better. Desperately, I snatched up his armor and we started buckling it in place as quickly as possible. I thanked the Ancestors he had spent good gold to get the lightweight stuff, because I sure wasn't going to win a contest of strength - I would have to keep moving or get squashed like a bug. I had to leave his weighty greatsword in favor of my own daggers. I scrambled out the door just as the announcer called for Everd, Leske shouting well wishes after me.

I stumbled out into the empty, bloodstained Proving Grounds, dazzled by the light of thousands of lamps and the roar of the crowd. I barely heard the announcer stating the rules, something about not killing your opponent, yada yada. I eyed the burly warrior across from me and ignored his polite greeting, not trusting my voice to sound like Everd's.

A bell rang and my opponent charged. He held a two-handed battleaxe, and I almost laughed. Stupid weapon. I waited for him to swing, hopped backwards as it whistled past, then lunged and drove a dagger into the exposed strapping on the side of his breastplate. The man dropped his axe and held up his hands.

"I yield!" he choked, coughing blood, and the medics carted him off.

I stood in stunned astonishment, unable to believe I had just won, even though the man _had_ been drugged. Now what? I looked around blankly, then heard the announcer present a new opponent. Apparently we'd entered the elimination round.

A short, wiry warrior strode into the ring, fighting with waraxe and shield. I bowed my head politely and again ignored his greeting. The announcer repeated the rules and I realized crotch shots were off limits, and was very glad I hadn't tried that.

The bell rang again, and we circled each other. This man held himself with care, and I knew there'd be fewer easy openings this time, so I settled in to wait him out. He tested me with a feinted swing, and I deliberately overreacted, flinching and knocking myself off-balance. He struck out with his shield to take advantage and shove me off my feet entirely, but I caught his arm and jerked him down with me, folding his axe arm underneath him. I started to strike at his throat, briefly exposed as he struggled to regain his footing, then remembered I was supposed to avoid the quick kill and missed my chance - he rolled away from me and came to his feet, and I swore under my breath.

We circled some more, and he tried to wait for me to make a move. I ignored him and the crowd grew restive, and finally began to boo. The proud warrior before me finally couldn't stand their booing and struck with his axe. I expected this and easily dodged his angry blow, slashing across the open joint in his armor over the elbow of his extended arm, neatly slicing through tendon. His axe fell from nerveless fingers, and he, too, yielded, led away by the competent battle medics.

I was starting to feel pretty good as the announcer proclaimed that this was the final round. Fat, lazy nobles, honor-bound and muscle-bound, I thought. Easy pickings.

The next man to face me, however, held a mace in each hand and no visor, his eyes glowing with malevolence, body lean and tough, and I swallowed hard. We eyed each other silently until the bell rang a third time, and he started shifting slowly sideways, circling and watching me move. I shuffled and pivoted instead of moving properly, trying to prevent him learning anything useful. Then I took a big step backwards to see what he'd do. Nothing. He grinned at me, telling me he was no fool and I'd have to do better than that if I wanted him to show me how to beat him.

I kept walking backwards until I'd almost backed myself into the wall, and his grin turned into puzzlement as he stood in the middle of the arena, now a good thirty feet away from me. I felt along the wall behind me, looking for the loose brick I'd noticed, probably knocked out in an earlier fight. I found it and worked it out of the wall. He saw me and scowled angrily; 'found weapons' were hardly honorable, although not technically forbidden. I approached him again, openly carrying the brick, and his scowl deepened as he set himself to dodge.

I came to just out of lunging distance and chucked it at him. He expected it, and also expected me to try to take advantage, so he dodged the brick while simultaneously preparing a retaliation. He didn't expect me to also throw a dagger.

I'm no knife-thrower, but he didn't know that. He flinched, knocking the badly-thrown dagger away with one gauntleted fist, and I ducked under his guard and attacked, trying to get my remaining blade up under his breastplate. A mistake: I should have gone over, not under, not when dealing with a heavy mace. He brought the second mace down on my hip, where the mail was flexible, and only the fact that my body wasn't shaped like Everd's prevented him connecting with bone in a crippling strike. Instead, he just gave me a bruise I could impress Leske with later.

I scurried out from under his reach and struck, backhanded, against his left knee as I passed - a desperate, opportunistic attack, but I got lucky and heard a grunt of pain. Standing up to face him again, I tested his mobility, sidestepping quickly, and saw to my satisfaction that he now favored that leg. I eyed my lost dagger ruefully where it lay by his feet. Well, I had steel gloves on.

I leaped, letting him swing at me and sliding the blow harmlessly along my arm, and punched him solidly in the mouth with my empty right hand, trying to force him to use his injured leg. Sure enough, he stumbled and almost fell, catching himself with one hand on the ground and swiping defensively at me with the other.

I was breathing hard and tiring fast in my heavy armor, which is why I didn't follow up as fast as I should have and missed my opening again. I muttered a frustrated oath, stepped back and held up my hands, then gestured towards the water boy hovering with the medics in the wings.

"Water break? You gotta be kidding," he growled, spitting blood. He hauled himself upright, but swayed dangerously when he put weight on his bad leg. "On second thought, maybe we _should_ take a break."

I breathed a sigh of relief and turned heavily towards the beckoning water. An instant later, his mace hit my helmeted head with a deafening clang, knocking me off my feet and sending my helmet flying. I stared dazedly up at him as he prepared another blow, but he stopped, face filling with shock, then fury. He raised his mace again and I suddenly knew he intended to kill me, a filthy duster, for daring to fight him.

"Stop!" roared the mighty voice of the announcer. My opponent froze as the emergency paralysis rune took effect, the Proving's last resort against an out-of-control berserker. Then I heard the noise from the crowd turning gradually from cheers to dark muttering, as those close enough to the arena to see my face whispered to their neighbors that a brand had disgraced the Proving.

My body gave up waiting for my brain to take action, and I was on my feet and bolting for the exit before I knew I'd moved. I bowled over the guards at the arena door and sprinted past Everd's changing room, hollering for Leske, and heard him fall in behind me as I dashed up the long corridor. If we could make it across the bridge to the Commons, we could disappear and be safe in Dust Town - oh Stone take him, Bherat would be there waiting for us.

No sooner had the thought crossed my mind when we blew through the doors and ran into Jarvia herself, Bherat's right hand woman. We tried to skid to a stop but missed our footing on the polished stone tiles, and the last thing I saw for a long time was Jarvia's club.

* * *

Who knows how long later, I groaned and reached up to touch the excellent goose egg that throbbed on the side of my head. I squinted around, the dim light from a single lamp searingly painful while my skull pulsed with a truly awesome headache. I groaned again and lay flat on the musty-smelling pile straw beneath me.

"Latitia? Are you OK?" Leske's voice had never been more welcome, even shaky with fear is it was.

"I need a new head. Can I have yours?" I mumbled.

He laughed nervously. "Can't be too bad if you're already cracking jokes. Listen, they didn't leave me anything I could use in here, I'm in my trousers and socks. Do you have anything useful?"

"Uhh..." I sat up slowly, holding onto the stone wall when my vision swam. Tunic, trousers, socks, yes. Oh! "I have the drawstring on my trousers. I never got around to fixing the button."

"Thank the Ancestors for that," Leske breathed. "Listen, I think the guard is coming back. Stone's mercy be with you!" And then he was silent, and I heard the jingling of chainmail and the bobbing light of a second lamp approaching my cell. I smeared some of the blood that oozed slowly from the small cut on the back of my head around on my face and arms, palmed the string, scooted over to the door and pretended to be barely alive. I didn't have to pretend very hard.

"Water," I begged pitifully when the guard arrived. I struggled to my feet, clinging to the iron bars as if too weak to stand, and reached out imploringly. "Please. I'm dying!"

Leske piped up. "Bherat won't like it if she dies. You know he wants to deal with her himself."

The guard swayed indecisively, then grudgingly approached and held out his flask. I reached out with both hands but pretended to be too weak to hold it and begged him to pour some into my mouth. Warily, he stepped closer and poured water across my face. I slurped it up gratefully, looping the string across the back of his neck with a flick of my wrist, and when he turned away, I braced a foot on the bars and yanked back on the string with adrenaline strength.

When he stopped kicking and lay still, I fumbled through his pockets for keys. He didn't have them, and I swore under my breath. Then I pulled his dagger from its sheath and unwrapped some of the decorative wire from the hilt, picking the lock on my door with nervous fingers. The door swung open, and I released Leske the same way. He threw his arms around me and we hugged, giddy with relief.

"Listen, if we're going to get away with this, we can't leave one single guard alive who's seen us," he warned me, pulling away.

"I get it," I agreed grimly. I wasn't a murderer and didn't relish the idea of leaving a trail of bodies, but this was a matter of survival.

We crept from the room, mercifully encountering very few of Bherat's paid cutthroats and thugs, and picking up some good weaponry as we passed an unoccupied barracks. We both had a dagger in each hand when we met our first resistance, two crossbowmen playing cards with their backs to us. I wanted to creep past them, but Leske stumbled in the dark. Twenty intense seconds later, and we each had a crossbow, too.

Cloaked in shadows, I was inching cautiously into Bherat's conference room when my blood froze at what I heard.

"I'm going to cut the whore loose," he was saying. "If that cunt of a sister of hers can't stay in her place, then I don't need Rica, either."

"Rica? Is that the one you're got all done up in lace? I've been wanting to get a piece of that," came an unfamiliar male voice.

"She's all yours, boys," Bherat declared magnanimously. "And let me tell you, it tastes as good as it looks."

Icy fury settled into my stomach, and suddenly murder didn't seem like such a bad idea. I took up my crossbow and fingered the trigger, but the movement caught Bherat's eye. He cast me a look of disgust.

"What in sod-all as _that_ doing out of its cage?" he snarled. At that, I released the bolt, which hissed across the room and embedded itself in his thigh. Beside me, I heard the snap of a bowstring and a second bolt cut a gash across his arm. Then it was time to cast down bows and draw daggers.

The fight was brutal. Bherat had been a pit fighter in his youth and remembered some pretty nasty tricks. By the time his limp body lay in a pool of blood, mingling with that of his two cronies, Leske was nursing shallow cuts all over his body, and I was clutching my face, nose snapped by a blow from Bherat's shield.

"Here, let me get that," Leske ordered, reaching over and deftly setting my broken nose, ignoring my yelp of pain. We spent a few moments applying bandages and some sort of fancy ointment we found on Bherat's body that claimed to be healing, marveling at the speed with which it stopped the bleeding. It did little for the rapidly-darkening shiner I'd gotten, though. Then we looked at each other and the elation of survival hit us. Now the whole fight was absolutely hilarious and totally awesome.

"I couldn't believe it when he was all, 'Get them!' And you were all, 'Eat this arrow, bitch!' You must be the luckiest duster ever!" Leske babbled excitedly, with gestures.

"Just as long none of these bastards gets a chance to lay hands on my sister," I growled. "Let's get out of here, quick, and make sure she's safe."

"Sure thing, boss. Hey, could you tell Rica it was me who killed Bherat? It doesn't do _you_ much good if she thinks you're the most virile warrior in Orzammar, but _me_, well... That sort of admiration can be useful, if you know what I mean," he winked.

"I just killed the last man who said that sort of thing," I warned, but not very seriously. Rica could do a lot worse than Leske. At least I knew Leske wouldn't get rough on her. Besides, he'd loved her for years.

"Hey, wait a second," Leske said suddenly. "Check it out, it's Bherat's office! There's gotta be cash in there, come on, quick, before anyone comes!"

Together we jimmied the door and then did a real hack-job of cracking the locks on two chests, finding some useless armor and then a treasure: A small pouch of silver. Snatching it up, we fled from the Carta's hideout, through the store front, past the flabbergasted shopkeep, and out into Orzammar Commons... into the waiting embrace of the guardsmen.

"There they are! Seize the fugitives!" The master of the Provings shouted.

"We just killed Bherat!" I snapped, crouching at bay on the store's front stoop beside Leske, daggers ready. "You should be thanking us!"

"He... he's dead? Bherat had ... powerful allies," the Provings master faltered. Then, the towering form of Gray Warden Duncan strode towards us.

"It seems this young woman has once again demonstrated her courage," he said in his deep, soft voice. "We Wardens travel far and wide in search of those with the potential to join our ranks. It seems we have found one."

I stared at him blankly. "Huh?"

"That I have found what I sought in Orzammar," he said gently. "Allow me to make my offer formal: I, Duncan of the Gray Wardens, extend the offer for you to join our ranks."

"This woman is wanted for treason!" The Provings master burst out. "You can't do this!"

"I can, and I am. Latitia, it would mean leaving your people to travel to the surface lands, but it would offer you a chance to strike a blow against the Blight," he continued unruffled. _And it may well save your life,_ was the unstated truth.

I thought about Rica and my wretched mother, and how vulnerable they were without me. I looked at Leske and he nodded encouragingly. Then, I looked at Duncan, resplendent in his shining armor with his eyes full of wisdom and compassion. Finally, I looked at the rulers of Orzammar standing before me and the contempt in their faces so strong, it was physically painful to have it directed at me. I thought about my fate if I stayed and my options if I left. I considered what the surface dwarf had said to me in the market. And I turned to Duncan and said, "Let's go."

So it was that I left Orzammar for the first time, with nothing but the shirt on my back and the daggers and coins in my pockets.


	3. Big Sky Country

Duncan led me to the Commons' massive freight elevator and bowed to its uniformed attendant, asking for the Hall of Heroes; the attendant fiddled with knobs and levers and I heard water rush into the counterweights below. My stomach lurched as the elevator was bouyed up, and after a few minutes my ears popped, and popped again, and one more time before the elevator stopped with a clunk.

The gemstone eyes of the Paragons glittered at me from their carved faces as I trotted after Duncan, taking two steps for each of his long strides. I looked for my favorites - Valen the Hungry stood in solid, humble granite, and Astyth the Grey's faceted obsidian sparkled in the torchlight, sharp and deadly as ever.

The bored guards roused themselves to crank open the massive double doors, and for a moment I hesitated, squinting out at the outdoor plaza under an impossibly bright gray sky. Duncan waited patiently for my eyes to adjust before leading me down a broad flight of stairs to the edge of the plaza, where a dwarven merchant lounged on a well-sprung carriage.

"Gherric," Duncan greeted the man with a nod, "May I introduce Latitia Brosca, our newest recruit."

Gherric nodded back, but a scowl flashed across his face when he saw my brand. I ducked my head submissively and tucked my hands in my pockets. With a quick look at Duncan's frown, the man muttered a barely audible "Stone met" before hopping down from his seat and untying five horses from their picket lines behind the wagon.

I stared openly as he hitched four of the long-legged beasts to the carriage, their black tails flicking idly as they waited with infinite patience for the harnesses to be checked and double-checked. They were beautiful.

Duncan swung up onto the fifth horse's glossy chestnut back, and it pranced a few sideways steps, its steel shoes ringing. "Steady," Duncan murmured, laying a firm hand on its muscular neck. "You've made your point."

He caught my inquiring look and explained, "He worries I'll put him in harness by accident if he doesn't remind me he's my warhorse." He smiled fondly at the animal, its ears pricked back to listen. "No fear, my friend. You were meant for greater things."

At Duncan's command, I climbed up to sit next to Gherric on the driver's bench, and off we went. The carriage team walked out the plaza's gate and then broke into a jingling trot when Gherric slapped the reins on their backs. I craned my neck to look about me at the trees and plants and other things I'd heard or read about but never seen.

Eventually I looked over my shoulder and saw the carriage's storage full of lyrium potions, exotic crafting components, and enchanted weaponry - a King's ransom of the best Orzammar would sell.

I must have made some sort of cry of amazement, because Duncan said, "That is for our army at Ostagar. We go to meet the armies of King Cailan and Teyrne Loghain, and hope to cut off this Blight before it can become too serious."

"A Blight? Now? But it's been hundreds of years since the last Blight."

"I have heard the Archdemon," he said simply. "I know there is a Blight. The King and the Teyrne do not believe me, thinking instead that the darkspawn are merely restless; I can only hope that their belief will not be necessary."

I thought about that for a while. Blights made little difference to the dwarves, generally, merely that the darkspawn became agitated and aggressive. But I knew the Gray Wardens were responsible for stopping Blights before they consumed the entire world.

No wonder Duncan was desperate enough to recruit a duster.

That thought shut me up for a long time. I didn't want to bother Duncan and Gherric responded to my tentative questions with grunts and monosyllables. He could have helped me a lot, I'm sure, answered my questions and allayed my fears as a dwarf who'd probably wondered all the same things when he'd left the safety of the Undermountain, but whether he was prejudiced or naturally taciturn, he had nothing to say to me.

He did, however, come to my aid on the third day, when the sun began to break through the clouds.

I was looking around, taking in the sights of the lowland forest and how the trees smelled different now, when I noticed a disc of light in the middle of the sky. It was already the brightest thing I had ever seen, and getting brighter, fast. My wagon-mate looked over and snapped, "Don't look it!"

"But it's so bright!" I said inanely, gaping.

"That's why you mustn't look at it!" He clamped his hat on my head, shoving it roughly over my eyes.

While I struggled to remove it, he explained that the sun could burn my skin and pierce my eyes like daggers, and that my body had no defense against it now. He said I would get used to it, but I must be very careful for some weeks. Then he said I could keep his hat until we got someplace where I could buy my own. I stammered my thanks, and contented myself with looking around at how the light sparkled on the leaves and stones around me.

That night, as we settled into camp, my hands and forearms felt very sore. When Duncan touched my wrist to guide me in setting up our campfire (they burned wood - it was free up here!), I cried out and clutched my hand to my chest.

"Stupid woman! I told you to keep out of the sun, didn't I?" Gherric growled as he stalked over to us.

"Why didn't you tell me I was sitting in it too long?" I complained.

"You'll learn better this way."

Duncan gave the man a hard look, and grudgingly, the trader produced a jar of lotion from his pack. He told me to apply it tonight and tomorrow, and the burn would heal by the end of that day. I thanked him and worried about how much it had cost and where I would get more of it. I had a feeling this wouldn't be my last sunburn.

"I am sorry, Latitia," Duncan apologized, finishing the campfire himself while I gingerly massaged ointment over my puffy skin. "I should have thought to warn you myself."

"It's not so bad, really, I'm fine," I said quickly, not wanting to look like a whiner in front of him. Then, encouraged by his concern, I asked, "So where is Ostagar? How long will it take to get there?"

"It lies on the edge of the Korcari Wilds - a land of barbarian tribesmen, mainly wetlands and sparsely settled," he explained, setting up a tripod for cooking stew. "It is an ancient watchtower and gateway, used to guard against incursions into Ferelden's south border. Ferelden is the human kingdom in this area," he added, seeing my confusion.

"Who else will be there?"

"The other Fereldan Gray Wardens, what few of us there are. You will work most directly with Alistair, the newest Warden, as is tradition; you yourself will mentor the next new Warden after you. We will also meet contingents from the Templars and the Circle of Magi..."

The conversation went on late into the night, and Duncan seemed pleased by my curiosity and tolerated the most obvious questions - "What is the sky," for example. That was a hard one because apparently nobody really knew, although some thought that it was basically a roof, like the world's biggest cave. That helped a little, at least until I asked "What are stars" and he suggested that they were floating fireballs. Over my head. Right now. Hundreds of them.

Great.

The journey took another week, and we traveled hard, pushing the horses to their limit to get to Ostagar before the battle. Gherric stopped once to trade for a fresh team, these ones mostly shades of gray, and we cantered on into the accursed sun. Duncan rode beside the carriage, pointing out interesting sights and answering questions, compassionately keeping my mind busy while I got used to all the ..._emptiness_.

The day we finally arrived, clouds had blown up in the night, heavy and gray and vaguely resembling the stone ceilings of home. I was glad of the small comfort, because I had been dreading reaching Ostagar. I feared the army, the other Wardens, Alistair - I feared their disappointment when they found out Duncan had brought me, instead of a mighty soldier from the Warrior Caste.

The slender watchtower loomed before us as we slowed to a walk in the softer, marshy ground. Its roof had long since crumbled, and most of the outbuildings and walls surrounding it showed signs of decay. I examined the tumbled stones with a critical eye as we approached the army's encampment; shoddy worksmanship, I decided - if a dwarf had built this, it would still look new.

When we rolled up to the wooden palisade gates, the guards greeted Duncan with immense respect, and ushered us into the officers' camp. I tried to melt into the carriage and avoid eye contact, but Duncan made me get down because Gherric had to report to the quartermaster and stable the horses. Then I lurked behind him and stared at my boots, too ashamed to stand next to him.

To my growing surprise, though, nobody seemed to care what I was. The humans and elves didn't notice my brand, or didn't know what it meant, and some even offered to shake my hand. When Duncan left me to wait outside the tent while he conferred with the war council, a passing soldier called me a 'pretty thing' and asked if I needed help!

I managed to stammer a "No, thank you," and tried to figure out what was happening here. When a group of mage women walked by, chattering together in their bright robes like a flock of birds, I finally figured it out.

Human women were tiny! Many were barely taller than me, and most were even skinnier, their hips and shoulders just as angular, their breasts ... well, usually they still had bigger tits than me, but at least the disparity wasn't quite as embarrassing. The significant differences lay in the shape of my face, with my broader cheekbones and rounder jaw, and I suspected that anyone really familiar with dwarven women would recognize me immediately, but the average shmuck didn't seem to know any different.

Well, now. Isn't that interesting?

"Hi," I called out to a small cluster of young men in scale mail as they passed by. "I'm new here. How's it going?"

They stopped and nudged one another. The most confident one stuck out his hand, smiling to show me his excellent teeth. "It's going good. You're here just in time for the fighting. I'm Daveth, I just got here yesterday."

I took his hand and shook it vigorously - the ritual was still new to me. "I'm Latitia. Do you know what I am?"

He didn't bat an eye. "Cute."

His compatriots rolled their eyes and one of them pulled on his elbow. "C'mon, Daveth, you've been slapped by enough women today. Leave the dwarf alone, they're tough."

"Dwarf?" Daveth repeated, raising an eyebrow. I struggled not to cringe, and was rewarded with a lascivious grin. "I've never kissed a dwarf before."

"Yeah? Well, I've never kissed a dog before, and I intend to keep it that way, you slick bastard," I grinned back. "Guess you're out of luck."

"Such cruelty," he moaned, letting his new friends drag him away. "Surely I will pine away and die because of this."

"And deny the darkspawn the chance to kill you? Now you're the cruel one," I called after him.

That had gone rather well. I gave a tight little shiver of excitement and daring as I thought about what to do next. Duncan had said he'd be busy for a while. Maybe I could explore.

I gravitated toward the familiar rhythmic clanging of the blacksmith and hung around the warm forge, getting in the way, until I wore out my welcome and the overworked man bribed me with a suit of standard-issue studded leather if I would take my nosy self out of his smithy. After that, I hovered around the edge of the officers' camp, afraid to wander into the maze of barracks tents and get lost, but curious about where the Gray Wardens lived.

Another young man was doing the same, but looking in towards the brightly striped tents of the royal guard, mages, and other High Grand Muckety-Mucks with a slight frown, as though waiting and worrying for someone. We eyed each other briefly but he seemed too distracted for me to want to try saying hello. After a few minutes his eyes suddenly grew wide and he started to duck behind the nearest tent, but a peremptory female voice screeched, "Alistair!"

He winced and turned back to her, reluctantly standing to attention. So this was Alistair? A gray-haired woman in elaborate Chantry robes gave him some orders I couldn't hear, and he saluted and marched off. After a moment's hesitation, I slunk after him, curious.

He wove through the tents for a while as though looking for someone, and finally found his quarry near the latrines. (I was glad to know where they were - I'd been wondering if people here just pissed in a ditch, or what.) He tapped a short, cranky-looking man in mage's robes on the shoulder and gave him some sort of message. The mage's face turned purple and he said something angry. I crept closer to listen in.

"I will not be harassed in this manner. I am busy with other tasks - on the King's orders, I might add," the pompous mage declared.

"Yes, _I_ was harassing _you_ by delivering a message," Alistair drawled.

"Your glibness does you no credit!"

"And here I thought we were getting along so well." Alistair sighed mournfully. "I was even going to name one of my children after you."

"Enough! I will go if I must. Out of my way, fool!" The infuriated man stomped off in disgust.

He passed right by where I lurked and the look on his face was so priceless, I burst out laughing. Alistair heard me appreciating his game and grinned impishly.

"You know, one good thing about the Blight is how it draws people together," he said.

I laughed, and we started chatting. I asked him why he and the mage had been sparring, and he explained about the rancor between the religious Chantry and the Circle of Magi.

"And it doesn't help that I used to be a Templar," he concluded.

"You were a mage-hunter?" I asked, startled, remembering Duncan's lecture on the nature of the Circle.

"Well, that's not all Templars do, but yes. I'm sure the Mother intended to insult that man by sending me as messenger, and he picked right up on that," he explained.

"Ah, so you are merely a victim of circumstance. Poor man, but a pawn in the game between Chantry and Circle," I teased.

"Yes! Finally, someone understands," he cried. "But enough about me. Who are you that understands my troubles so well?"

"I'm Latitia Brosca. Duncan brought me from Orzammar today," I said, and stuck out my hand. He shook it, his gauntlets rough against my fingers.

"I saw Gherric, I thought he must be here somewhere, I didn't know he'd found anyone. Is he here? He's been gone for ages." He said all this very quickly, his eyes eager.

"He's here, he's talking to the war council. Want me to show you? I should go back now anyway, before he starts looking for me."

He nodded and I tried to retrace my steps, letting him nudge me in the right direction once before I got oriented. Duncan was standing outside the tent and talking to a mismatched pair of men, one of them the suave Daveth and the other an older man with a greatsword and splintmail.

"Duncan," Alistair called, waving and beaming. I resisted rolling my eyes and tried to slink along in his shadow, hoping my return would go without comment. Duncan squeezed Alistair's shoulder in one of those understated male greetings before introducing us to the others.

"This is Ser Jory, a knight from Redcliffe, and this is Daveth, an entrepreneur from Denerim and a fine archer." Duncan indicated the others, and Daveth smirked at the word 'entrepreneur.' "Daveth, Jory, this is Alistair, a Gray Warden and your group leader for now. And this is Latitia - "

"We've met," Daveth interrupted, smirking.

Duncan raised an eyebrow at him, and continued, "Latitia Brosca of Orzammar, who has just joined us today. Now, as I was just explaining to these two," he turned back to me, "I need you four to make a trip into the Wilds for two purposes. One is to bring back fresh darkspawn blood for your Joining ritual, and the other is to visit an old cache of Gray Warden documents."

Duncan pulled out a creased and well-used map, pointing to a specific location marked 'cache.' "It lies enchanted against everyone except other Wardens, in a smaller tower a few miles east."

"Right at the edge of darkspawn territory," Alistair noted.

"Then it shouldn't be too hard to get some fresh blood, eh?" I grinned. "Sounds easy enough."

Things couldn't have gone better. This was exactly my line of work: Sneak through darkspawn territory, find a treasure, bring it back, and stay alive to do it again. I couldn't believe my luck that my first assignment would be so perfect.

"Right, travel through the Wilds past evil witches, barbarians, wolves and now darkspawn, how hard could it be?" Daveth laughed, but a little while showed around his eyes. He really was scared. Probably never even seen a darkspawn before. Ha!

"I've been outsmarting darkspawn since I was twelve," I boasted. I couldn't resist showing off just a little in front of Duncan. "I'll watch your back if you watch mine."

"Oh, I'll be watching, all right," he leered.

"Daveth, that will do," Duncan told him firmly. Torn between feeling guilty for provoking Daveth and being pleased at coming out on top, I decided to just shut up for the rest of the meeting.

"As I was saying," Duncan continued, refolding the map and handing it to Alistair, "The documents include treaties promising aid to the Gray Wardens from various parties. So long has passed since the last Blight, many have forgotten their promises, and the life-debt they owe the Wardens. These treaties may prove invaluable, for our numbers are too few to stop this Blight alone."

He rested his hand on Alistair's shoulder again. "Watch over your charges, Alistair, and return safely."

Alistair snapped to attention and saluted with considerably more eagerness than he had done for the Chantry harpy – I mean, Mother Superior – and, with a respectful nod to Duncan, we all turned to follow him out the east palisade gate. The guards warned us to be back before dark, and we stepped out into the swamps, loosening our weapons in their sheaths.


	4. Integration

The four of us walked slowly along an overgrown path, alert for ambush by beast or darkspawn. I also surreptitiously kept an eye on Alistair, hoping to learn more about how a Gray Warden should act while on the job. I felt acutely conscious of my lack of training anywhere except the streets, and outclassed next to a man who had almost joined one of the most elite forces in Ferelden - only to be conscripted by one even more respected.

The real differences between this human and the soldiers of Orzammar became more apparent when we fought together. In stark contrast to the burly dwarven warriors, with their ostentatious gear and look-at-me attitude, Alistair was long and lean and moved easily, with none of the arrogant swagger of the men of the Stone, and wore his practical armor like a second skin, unconcerned by the blood and worse that spattered us all.

In our first skirmishes, encounters with dog-like animals called wolves who hunted similarly to the deep stalkers of home, I tried to mimic the fighting stance Ser Jory and Alistair used; Jory appeared to have had similar basic combat training to Alistair's. I stood straight, shoulders square to my opponent, feet braced, and swung my daggers with emphasis on the power of the blow.

It went all right, as long as I kept close enough to Alistair to avoid being attacked by too many at once, but I spent most of my time trying to stay out of his way as blow after blow failed to deal any significant damage. I felt near to tears when Jory beheaded a wolf as it leaped for my throat, bleeding from an insignificant cut on its shoulder where I'd tried, and failed, to kill it myself. He was too polite to say anything about it, but I had a feeling my experiment wasn't going well.

Then, Alistair paused at a place where the path diverged for a consultation.

"We need darkspawn blood, so we can't just avoid them entirely, we're going to have to fight some eventually," he said, rubbing his hands together. "There's a small group of them down that path there."

"How can you tell?" I asked.

"Gray Wardens can sense darkspawn nearby. The older they are, the better they get at it. I'm not very good at it yet, but I can tell when they're really close. At any rate," he continued, pointing down the path, "They probably don't know we're here yet, so let's give them a surprise visit. Jory, with me. Daveth, hang back and see if you can get high ground. Latitia..."

He frowned, not sure what to do with me. "I'll go with you," I said quickly.

The three of us strode quickly down the path, and I winced at all the noise they were making. I changed my mind about staying with them, and tapped Alistair's elbow and gestured towards the bracken off to the left, indicating I wanted to go that way instead of walking on the path. He frowned, confused, so I just left before he could ask questions and make even more noise.

I padded off into the bracken, silent on the soft, wet earth. I saw the darkspawn before they saw me, concealed as I was.

Six glenlocks and their hurlock leader had killed a deer and bent low over its belly, squabbling over the meat. This was his idea of a "small group"? Sure, we had the jump on them, but I didn't like being outnumbered this badly. I wondered if he didn't know how many were here.

No sooner had this unhappy thought crossed my mind than the hurlock's head came up and turned toward the path. It had heard them, Paragons be with us, so much for surprise. It barked a command in its gutteral voice, and the pack has getting to their feet and drawing weapons just as my own group came into view.

Daveth, clever boy, already had an arrow on the string and let it fly towards a glenlock archer as it tried to aim. The arrow hit home and the glenlock fell, clutching at the feathered fletching that protruded from its throat. A second archer took aim as the rest of its pack closed with Jory and Alistair, its arrow shattering against Alistair's shield as he thrust it in front of Jory's startled face.

Jory exposed himself horribly as he made a massive overhand swing at the hurlock and I winced as I darted out from cover towards the melee, but he lucked out as the beast that flanked him aimed badly and glanced off his armor. The hurlock deflected Jory's stroke and prepared his own as Jory struggled to recover. Stupid, stupid. Men and their obsession with big weapons. Even darkspawn weren't immune to the allure, it seemed, as the hurlock swung wide with its own greatsword and almost lopped off the head of an underling.

Alistair ducked Jory's backswing and skewered the glenlock that flanked him, then stepped into the space it had occupied to protect Jory's rear as I arrived on the scene.

I didn't even consider trying to play soldier, not now. I sank both daggers hilt-deep in the hurlock's lower back, aiming up under the backplate. It would take too long to die but I didn't see a better opening. Jory would have to finish it himself. I jumped away from the hurlock before it could elbow me in the face, and kicked at the back of the nearest glenlock's knee.

The knee gave way. The beast didn't fall, but it staggered, and to my delight, Alistair seized the advantage and lashed out with his shield and knocked it over backwards. I dodged the falling body and cut its throat as it struggled to regain its feet.

The odds were looking better now. I turned to look back at the remaining archer in time to watch Daveth turn its head into kebab, and grinned.

Shouldn't have looked away. I felt a spray of blood hit the back of my neck and whirled to see Alistair wrenching his sword from the body of an opportunistic glenlock. A second spatter of tainted blood decorated my chest as Jory cleaved the hurlock's left forearm off, and the beast, already short of blood, collapsed from shock.

The three of us turned to face the last glenlock. A normal creature would have fled, but the ravening monster actually slavered as it struck at Alistair. He punch-blocked its blow with his shield, and longsword, greatsword and dagger ran it through before it could recover its balance. It crumpled, twitching.

I jerked my dagger free and turning to grin proudly at Alistair. He was wiping his sword on a limp body. "Why didn't you fight like that before?" he asked, and I couldn't blame him for wondering. "You've just been standing like a statue up till now."

I felt a blush threatening and cursed myself for it. "I, well, I thought I should fight like... like you, actually. You know-" I struck an exaggerated 'noble warrior' pose, "-stand strong, face your foe, defeat him with honor!"

I abandoned the pose and took my daggers out, spinning them oh-so-casually across the backs of my fingers. Learning the trick had cost me several hours and many self-inflicted injuries, but it did look impressive. "But what I'm really good at is the quick and dirty. Take them down before they know you're there."

My little trick was impressing the boys. It always did. Something about spinning blades is hypnotic to men. I'd avoided a lot of fights with this kind of display.

Alistair said, "You can do _that_ and you want to be like _me_? I'd lose an eye if I tried that!"

"Yeah, and if I tried to wield your sword, I'd knock myself over." I stopped playing and slid my daggers back in their sheathes.

He clapped me on the back. "Well, we should all use the gifts the Maker gave us. Or at least that's what the Chantry sisters always said. Funny how they never let me use my God-given good looks."

"Maybe it's the ladies' job to make use of God's gift to women," I said slyly. Alistair laughed and blushed.

_Ooh, hey, we're bonding! This is camaraderie!_

"Where's Daveth?" Jory said suddenly, looking around.

I jogged a few steps toward where I'd last seen him, intending to congratulate him on his excellent marksmanship, but my breath froze when I saw him. He'd sank down to the grass, leaning on a tree and breathing heavily, the feathered fletching of one of the short, heavy darkspawn arrows protruded from his left side.

"All right, let's get you cleaned up," Alistair said heartily, tossing his gear aside and pulling bandages and a jar of salve from his belt pack. He dropped to his knees beside the stricken man and began to unbuckle his armor to get access to the wound. I sat beside Daveth, ostensibly to help him lean back and rest, but I was ready to pin him to the ground when it was time for Alistair to remove the arrow. If Daveth jerked, his flesh would tear.

"You have incredible focus to be able to finish that beast with an arrow in your side," I complimented him. "I would be too busy screaming. When we get back to camp, I'm buying you a drink."

He grinned weakly, a shadow of his usual charm. "It's a date, then. I'll hold you to- ARRG!"

Alistair had jerked the arrow free while I distracted him. It had one of the cruel, barbed points used by darkspawn hunters, and fresh blood began pouring out of the wound. Daveth trembled violently and I pressed his shoulders firmly into the ground, rubbing the place where his neck and shoulders joined with my thumbs as hard as I could to distract him from the pain. It was a trick we used in Dust Town, where no one could afford anesthesia. Rubbing the victim's face worked better, but I didn't think he would understand what I was trying to do, and I didn't want to distress him further.

Alistair smeared a glob of the salve into the wound, pushing it in as far as he could with one finger. Daveth groaned. The blood slowed, then stopped, and the Daveth relaxed with a sigh.

"There, that ought to do it," Alistair said cheerfully, wrapping bandages around Daveth waist. "By tomorrow you'll be as good as new. The bandage is really just to keep that poultice from rubbing off."

I released him and helped him sit up. "Seriously, you did awesome," I assured him.

"You just can't keep your hands off me," he winked, and I knew he'd be fine.

"Thanks tons for the help, Jory," I snapped at the man who was standing with his back to us several steps away, staring at the mangled corpses.

"I just can't believe you people seem to be enjoying this! What was he thinking, sending us out here? This is too dangerous! Daveth could have died! _And_ it's cold!" Jory burst out.

"Nah, he's fine," Alistair said breezily. "And now we have plenty of darkspawn blood."

Jory stared at him for a minute, then stomped off.

"Gee, I'm so glad they sent him with us," I muttered to Alistair as we followed, boots squelching in ankle-deep mud. "He's a right ray of sunshine, really."

"Now, we all have our roles to play against the darkspawn," Alistair said. "I bash their brains in, Daveth turns them into pincushions, you do your dual-dagger dance of death, and Jory whines at them until they kill themselves out of desperation."

I laughed. "'Dual-dagger dance of death,' eh? I like it. Shall I dance to your sword-and-shield symphony?"

"That's only three S's. I used four D's. You'll have to do better than that," he nudged me with an elbow.

"Steel sword-and-shield symphony of slaughter?"

"Five S's! I am defeated," he cried in mock dismay.

"That is steel, right? I'd hate to be inaccurate." I reached up to grab the hilt of his sword and pull it a few inches out of the scabbard so I could examine the blade.

"Hey!" he protested, "you can't just go touching a man's sword like that! That's personal."

"Listen, mate, just because a lady's never touched your sword before-" Daveth began with a smirk, but Alistair interrupted him, holding up a hand for silence. He stood still for a few seconds, squinting his eyes shut.

"This way," he muttered, and turned off the path, slogging through the marshy grasses to the north. After a while he pulled out the map and studied it, turning it upside-down, then sideways.

"Ah," he said finally. "Here. We go around that hill there, we can avoid those scouts." He gestured vaguely in the opposite direction. I suppose, if I were a Gray Warden, that would have made sense.

We spent about another hour with our boots full of mud, as Alistair led us deeper into the swamps and had to make more frequent detours to avoid darkspawn patrols. The sun sank towards the horizon and Jory's spirits drooped with it, and he lagged behind, staring at his wet feet.

Eventually, a decrepit ruin loomed out of the mist and we searched it eagerly. To our horror, the enchanted chest was shattered and empty. As we were all exchanging looks of dismay, a light and faintly amused voice came from behind us.

"Well, well. What's this? Are you scavengers, searching a corpse long since picked clean? Or are you intruders in my Wilds?" The voice belong to an elegantly exotic woman, her body scandalously bare beneath robes more decorative than functional, her hair pinned up and decorated with feathers and beads.

"Careful," Alistair warned, shifting his grip on his shield. "There could be others nearby."

"Oh, so you expect barbarians to swoop down upon you!" The woman cried, waving her arms dramatically. I laughed a bit at that.

"Yes," Alistair mused. "Swooping is bad."

Daveth was twitching with barely contained fear. "That's a witch of the wilds, that is! She'll turns us all into frogs!" he wailed.

"Witch of the wilds? Such fanciful stories. Tell me, dwarf," she addressed me directly, "do you share the fears of your surfacer friends? Come, let us be civilized. I am Morrigan."

"I'm Latitia," I replied automatically. "Pleased to meet you."

"Now there is a proper civil greeting," she said with sardonic delight. "Now, in answer to your unspoken question, no, I have not stolen your precious scrolls. 'Twas my mother, in fact."

"Can you take us to her?" I asked, ignoring Daveth's frantic head-shaking and pleading eyes.

"What a practical attitude! I like you," the exotic woman declared, and beckoned us to follow, sashaying back through the marshes.

"Watch out," Alistair whispered to me. "First it's all 'I like you' and then it's _bam_ - frog time."

After some time we arrived at a rude hut that squatted at the foot of yet another ruined wall, so decrepit, it apparently only remained standing out of habit. In a wicker chair out front sat the oldest human woman I'd ever seen, her eyes red and sad and her body stooped with the weight of years.

"What have you brought me, Morrigan?" Her voice crackled like ancient parchment. "Have you been playing with your food again?"

Daveth whimpered, and the ancient woman gave a dusty chuckle.

"I found a Gray Warden, Mother," the woman who led us announced. "He is a bit slow, but he will have to do."

"Hey," Alistair protested mildly.

"Now, Morrigan," the crone chided. "Be polite to our guests."

"Why? They were not polite to me. Except for that one." Morrigan pointed at me.

"I'm Latitia," I said again, since it had worked last time. "Pleased to meet you."

"See?" Morrigan said.

"Since we are all being civil," her mother said, dragging herself laboriously to her feet, "I am Flemeth. Yes," she added in response to Daveth's yelp of terror, "_The_ Flemeth."

Whoever that was. Honestly, I didn't care. If she had the treaties, then I was going to be polite to her. At least until we got them back.

She shuffled towards the door of her hut, and Morrigan came forward and offered her arm solicitously. Flemeth waved her away and went inside, rattling around for a while and eventually returning with a leather-wrapped bundle.

"Your excuse for a seal wore off years ago," she huffed, seating herself with a thump in her battered chair. "I've been holding onto them for you."

"Thank you very much," I said, coming forward and holding out my hands.

She gave me a hard look. "I didn't do it for you. Tell your commanders that the threat of the Blight is far greater than they realize."

"I will do that," I promised, taking the bundle and bowing extravagantly, enjoying the game. "Thank you again."

"Such manners!" The woman laughed a creaky old laugh. "Perhaps I should always make my dealings with Orzammar's finest."

And with that, she dismissed us, commanding Morrigan to lead us back to Ostagar safely.

Scampering along in the woman's wake and taking two steps for every one of Alistair's, I tugged on his arm and said excitedly, "We've got everything now, right? We can do the Joining right away!"

"Yes..." he replied, but his voice sounded strange, almost reluctant, and he was avoiding my eyes.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"I like you guys," he said simply, shrugging his arm out of my grip and speeding up to walk in front.

I broke into a jog to keep up. "Why is that bad? Alistair? Why is it bad that you like us?" I called, but he ignored me until we got back to camp.

We arrived just as the gate guard had begun chaining the great wooden palisade gates closed. He waved us inside with an irritated reprimand for being late, and we hustled across the packed earth looking for Duncan .

Duncan thanked us for retrieving the treaties, but then asked Alistair to continue to protect them, for no obvious reason other than to allow that brief look of pride to flash across his face. He'd taken the blood we'd collected and they'd both disappeared, leaving the three of us to stand around feeling useless. Eventually we found our way to the mess hall and scrounged some leftovers, having missed dinner, and then an officious woman with a clipboard found us and ordered the men to one tent and me to another for sleep.

The interior of the canvas tent, as large as my apartment at home and supported by wooden poles, contained a half-dozen cots used by the female Wardens. They greeted me politely and gave me blankets and kind smiles, but otherwise remained aloof, making me feel like a child or some sort of servant. Basically, the way I always felt outside of Dust Town. I was disappointed.

I followed them to breakfast in the morning, but the group dispersed and I couldn't decide where to sit. Everyone looked so shiny and clean and I doubted they'd welcome me at their table. I ended up eating sitting down in a corner, my tray on my lap, rather than risk being told to shove off if I tried to sit at a table with the wrong group.

The hall began to empty as people finished eating, and I didn't know what I was supposed to do now. I poked at my eggs, rubbery and cold, and gave up on them, wrapping them in a napkin and stuffing them in a pocket before going outside to explore. I quickly got lost and wandered aimlessly after that, dodging the knots of army soldiers that jogged past, chanting to each other as they exercised.

Near the edge of camp, I found a training field where the Gray Warden warriors were drilling under the instruction of a red-faced sergeant. I crept under the shade of a short tree – or was it a tall bush? What's the difference? – to observe. About fifty men, mostly human, practiced in two groups according to whether they fought with sword and shield or with two-handed weapons. It took me a while but eventually I picked out Alistair in the group, recognizing the symbol on his shield.

Their precision was beautiful, their weapons flashing, but after an hour or so of watching them swing one way, then swing another way, then practice this block, then this other block, I was bored to tears and started digging up an anthill. Perhaps warrior training was not for me, after all.

When the sergeant finally dismissed everyone for lunch, I ran after Alistair.

"Can I eat lunch with you?" I begged. I didn't want to stand alone in the middle of the hall with my tray of food feeling stupid – once was enough.

He looked a bit taken aback at being accosted. "Uh - " he glanced after the other warriors filtering through the maze of tents towards the mess hall. "Sure. Come on."

I followed his lead, trotting a step behind him, and copied him once we got there, trying to fit in, picking up the same utensils and dishing out the same food, although only about half as much. Then I scurried along in his wake as he wove through the crowded tables.

I froze uncertainly when I saw where Alistair intended to sit. Duncan and several other senior Wardens occupied all but one place on the long benches, which Duncan appeared to have saved for Alistair, greeting him with a warm smile and a question about the day's training. I had started to turn and look for another table when Duncan's rich voice called me back.

"Latitia, please, you are welcome to join us. Allow me - " And he gestured for the others to scoot closer and open up room on the bench beside him.

Awed and tongue-tied, I climbed over the bench and spilled water down my front when I tripped on the too-high seat. Duncan appeared not to notice, but I suspected he was being gracious again. I ate my food in silence and listened to Alistair give an animated account of something he'd been doing early this morning with the regular army's trainees, something to do with group tactics that was beyond my ken.

The other Wardens ignored me entirely, and I thought about Alistair's obvious discomfort with me, in such contrast to his warmth yesterday, and the coldness of the women in my barracks, and wondered again about why he had been unhappy about liking me and Daveth. Were personal friendships discouraged? But no, he obviously had a strong bond with Duncan.

I pushed the last of a gummy vegetable mash around my plate as others started getting up and putting their dishes away. I looked up suddenly when I felt a hand on my shoulder and saw Duncan leaning down to talk to me.

"We must complete the preparations for the Joining. Please gather the others and await us at the bonfire in the center of camp. We will come to give you more information around midafternoon," he told me, giving my shoulder a final squeeze before turning to leave. Alistair gave me an odd look, apologetic or maybe even regretful, before jogging after him.


	5. The Joining

Later that afternoon, Daveth, Jory and I huddled around the bonfire at the center of camp, waiting for Alistair to call us and trying to shake off the chills we'd all felt since hearing the words "if you survive" in connection with our imminent Joining.

"I'm not so sure about this anymore," Jory burst out suddenly. "I have a wife, you know, and she's near to term with our first child. If I'd known, when Duncan invited me, that the Joining could be fatal... I'd never have left her."

I felt a pang of unexpected pity for Jory and sorrow for his wife and child. I wouldn't wish life without a father on any child, not after how I'd experienced it.

"Being a soldier is inherently dangerous," I told him, trying not to sound accusing. "Your wife should be prepared for this. She is, isn't she? You did leave her with enough money, didn't you?"

He squirmed, and admitted, "I did not make such a fine living as a soldier that I could afford to put much away." He paused, and wailed, "I - I don't know if I can do this!"

Suddenly Daveth cut in. "What does a single family matter in the face of the Blight? You heard Duncan, the danger is real. Jory, if the Blight isn't stopped, your family will be lost anyway. You're doing the right thing by them in joining the Wardens. Me, I'm not afraid. Yeah, big words and all, but the way I see it, I'm a dead man anyway. I would of swung from a gallows if Duncan hadn't brought me here, did you know that? If I survive the Joining, it's just gravy."

I nodded. "Same goes for me. I would have been banished to the Deep Roads had Duncan not intervened. You're right, Daveth; the Joining is a chance at life, not a risk of death - for us two, anyway." Again, I tried not to sound accusing, and mostly failed. Jory groaned.

Then Alistair came out from the ruins and called for us. We followed him up a flight of lichen-splotched stairs and into a roofless tower room, secluded from the rest of the camp. Duncan waited there, holding a silver chalice and standing next to several bedrolls. I eyed the bedrolls suspiciously. They could just as easily serve as body bags.

"As you all know by now, the Joining is dangerous," Duncan said gravely. "Some of you may not survive. However, please know that it is necessary, and it is the source of our power and our ability to stop the Blight. Without the Joining, we are merely soldiers. Do you understand?"

I looked around at my companions and saw Daveth's confident nod and Jory's nervous, barely-affirmative twitch. Then I met Duncan's eyes and nodded firmly.

Duncan indicated the chalice. "Then let us begin. The ritual is simple, yet profound in its effect. You will drink from this chalice -"

"That's got darkspawn blood in it," I interrupted.

Duncan continued unruffled. "Yes, it is the source of the danger here. Be comforted that we do our best to protect you with the magic of the Ritual. As I was saying, you will drink from this chalice, once we have spoken some words. They are few, but they have been spoken since the beginning."

Duncan and Alistair spoke then in unison, intoning solemnly, "Join us, brothers and sisters. Join us in the shadows where we stand, vigilant. Join us as we carry the duty that cannot be foresworn. And should you perish, know that your sacrifice will not be forgotten, and that one day, we shall join you."

Daveth went first, took a hearty swig of the black liquid in the cup, and immediately coughed and clutched at his stomach. Alistair helped him lie down on a bedroll, and we watched breathlessly. At first, he merely trembled in obvious pain, but soon he began to thrash and scream, a horrible, tearing sound. And then he fell silent, lying limp on the floor.

Duncan sighed heavily. "I am sorry, Daveth," he said, and sounded like he meant it. I, meanwhile, was only barely keeping myself from soiling my trousers. I clenched my fists to stop my hands shaking and watched while Alistair covered the body and Duncan offered the deadly cup to Jory.

Jory shook his head and backed away. "I can't!" he wailed. "I didn't know! Please!" His shoulders bumped the rough masonry of the tower wall.

Duncan's face set, and he spoke firmly. "You must partake, Jory. There is no turning back now."

Jory's face contorted in shame and terror and he cast about him in panic. Seeing no escape from the inexorable Duncan, he suddenly sprang forward and drew his greatsword. "Let me go!" he shouted. Without missing a beat, Duncan drew his short sword.

"No - don't - he has a child!" I cried, jumping towards him, hands outstretched though I had no idea what to do. But they ignored me. Jory began his swing, and Duncan smoothly lunged and ran the man through, as neat a kill as any assassin would be proud. I stared in utter shock.

"I'm sorry, Jory," Duncan murmured, laying his shivering body to the ground, and again, he sounded like he meant it. Jory's twitching ceased and he lay still. Duncan gently closed his eyes. Then, with implacability that would impress a boulder, he turned to me and again held out the cup.

"You murdered him!" I blurted, and pressed my violently shaking hands to my mouth.

"When he went for his sword, he left me no choice," Duncan said sadly. "Let us complete this ritual, Latitia. It may yet end in joy, and a new sister to join our family."

Not trusting myself to speak, I took the cup and gulped some of the vile liquid, holding my breath against its darkspawn stench. It burned like whiskey in my throat and I gagged, then clenched my arms around my belly as my stomach caught fire. I dimly felt Alistair pick me up and lay me on the bedroll, but mainly I was busy being in unbearable agony.

Then I became aware of something more than the fire. An alien presence flooded my veins, a sense of brooding intent, an eternal evil bent upon escape from its damnation. It sensed me, too, and struck. I shrieked as the pain increased fivefold, and I heard, deep in the silence of my soul, the most incredibly beautiful song, a siren call that beckoned to me with its irresistible sweetness. I longed to join it and opened my heart to its call, and the pain began to numb as my breathing slowed, then stopped.

And then, echoing up through the hard stone at my back, came a chorus of hundreds of voices - thousands - tens of thousands, all screaming their defiance. The achingly beautiful song shattered before the force of my ancestors, and I felt a fierce joy and love from all the generations of dwarves who had died fighting the darkspawn and gone before me into the Stone.

"_Avenge us_," they whispered, and they were gone.

I gasped and my eyes flew open. Alistair had been about to cover me with a blanket, just as he had poor Daveth, but his expression changed from sorrow to stunned disbelief, rapidly followed by joy.

"Duncan," he shouted, "she made it!"

Duncan took two long strides and knelt at my side. "You are one of us now," he said warmly. "Welcome, sister." He held out a hand and helped me sit up.

"Welcome, indeed!" Alistair sounded giddy with relief, and I realized what depth of guilt he had felt when he thought he had invited all three of us to our deaths. Suddenly the regretful look he'd given me earlier made sense, and I knew why the other Wardens had kept their distance from me: They must all have remembered their own Joining, and feared I would die in agony. Impulsively, I threw my arms around him and hugged him tightly for an instant.

"Nice try," I said, ignoring his astonishment. "You can't get rid of me that easily."

"I am sorry to leave you so soon," Duncan apologized, "But the King has requested my presence at a strategy meeting. He would like to meet you, as well; he instructed me to bring any new Gray Wardens to him immediately. Take a moment to recover, but if you can, please join us within the hour." He gifted me with a rare broad smile, then withdrew, clanking down the stairs in his distinctive armor.

Alistair handed me his water flask, and I took it gratefully. When I had drunk almost the whole thing, I wiped my mouth and groaned. "Sod that," I complained. "That sucked gravel. Remind me not to join any more elite militant orders, all right?"

"Are you hungry?" he asked, face still showing traces of worry. "After my Joining, I felt like there wasn't enough food in the world. For weeks, I ate everything I could get my hands on."

I considered this. "Not right now," I decided. "I feel pretty nasty and I don't want to barf on the King. Help me up?"

He took my hand and pulled me to my feet, where I swayed momentarily. He grabbed my shoulder and steadied me.

"Don't push too hard," he warned.

"I'm fine now," I insisted, and after a few breaths, I felt ready to descend the stairs and meet the King.

When we entered the war chamber, King Cailen turned and beamed at us. I suppressed a look of surprise at the youthfulness of his face, with his wide blue eyes and blond hair that was a little too pretty. I hastily ducked my head before he could see my brand, afraid to offend him with my presence. So far, nobody seemed to notice or care, but surely a King would know.

"Come, little lady, let me greet my newest Gray Warden," he cried cheerfully, striding over and grabbing my chin, pulling it up to look in my eyes. I braced myself, but he just smiled.

"I've heard tales of the bravery of the stout and honorable dwarves. Proud am I to have the mighty Gray Wardens fight by my side in glorious battle," he enthused. Then, to my horror, he released his grip on my chin and swept me an extravagant bow. I cast Alistair a terrified look, but he shrugged helplessly. The king rose from his bow and looked at me expectantly.

I considered bowing back, but a dozen ways this could go horribly wrong flashed through my head. How low should I bow? How long should I stay down? What if I got dizzy again and fell over? If I got it wrong... Then I had an idea.

I held out both fists, thumbs up, at chest height and met the king's expectant gaze with one of my own. King Cailan looked briefly puzzled, then mimicked my gesture. Gently, I brought my fists down on top of his in a light blow.

"Now you do it," I encouraged him. Hesitantly, he imitated me.

"That's the dwarven twin hammers sign," I explained. "It means 'respected comrade' and 'I look forward to working with you.'"

"How delightful," he exclaimed. "Show me again!" I repeated the gesture, and then again a third time, before a gruff voice interrupted us.

"Yes, thank you, as fascinating as that little cultural lesson was, I have a battle to plan."

I looked around and saw a grim-faced man, the Teyrn Loghain, directing a predator's stare at Cailen. The king turned hastily back to the table, on which maps and plans were laid, and I backed away, trying to avoid attracting any more attention, until I bumped into Alistair. He steadied me and I sagged with relief.

"That was gutsy," he whispered. "What made you do that?"

"I have no idea," I admitted. "I think I'm still a little woozy from the Joining. I was too afraid to try to bow or - or curtsy, or whatever a human would do, so I decided to change the rules to a game I could play."

"Well, it worked," he said, patting my shoulder before stepping away and standing to attention.

The king was explaining to Duncan that several small skirmishes had been won, and that he saw no need to wait for the Orliesan Wardens or for reinforcements from Redcliffe, wherever that was.

"Alas, there seems no sign of an Archdemon," he concluded.

"Disappointed, your Majesty?" Duncan asked dryly.

"I'd hoped for a battle like the legends, the King riding to war with the mighty Gray Wardens at his side! Ah well, this will have to do," he sighed.

I happened to be watching Loghain's face as the King said this, and I felt a chill as Loghain aimed a look of bitter disgust at the silly young King.

The battle plans were quickly laid out, a hammer-and-anvil tactic that seemed simple enough. The Gray Wardens were to draw the darkspawn army into Ostagar's battlefield, where, upon a prearranged signal, Loghain would lead the regular soldiers against the enemy's flank.

"Who should we send to light the signal fire?" Duncan asked. "That fire must be lit at the proper time, or we risk serious casualties."

"Then we should send our best," cried the excessively jovial King. "Let us task our young Wardens, here, with the job of lighting the all-important fire."

"Agreed," nodded Duncan, and I felt a fresh wave of relief at not having to join the army tonight. I felt distinctly not my best. "Alistair, Latitia, you will stand atop the watch tower and await my signal. I have a magical rod, here, that will send up a flare. That is when you must light the fire. Understood?"

We nodded.

"Then go and rest," he told me gently. "Alistair will take you where you may find supper, if you wish it. When the call to assemble for battle comes, that is when you will go to your place on the tower."

Gratefully, I smiled and nodded at him, then turned to leave. King Cailan caught my elbow, though, and insisted on repeating the twin hammers sign I'd taught him as a farewell gesture. I suppressed a giggle as Alistair rolled his eyes comically behind the King's back.


	6. The Betrayal

On our way back through the camp towards the mess hall, we passed several knots of Wardens deep in preparation for the coming battle, all of whom looked up as we passed and waved, cheering and congratulating me. Alistair waved back and encouraged me to do the same, and I did, grinning.

After some biscuits with jam (I still didn't feel up to anything heavy), I suggested we take our water and equipment up to the tower early and just wait there. He agreed, but when I stood up from the table, I had another dizzy spell, and clung to the edge of the table for several seconds until it passed. I looked up to see Alistair watching me with renewed concern.

"Duncan wouldn't really have made me fight tonight, would he?" I asked, and tried not to blush when I heard how small and weak I sounded.

"I doubt it," he said. "It's normal to feel a bit under the weather after the Joining. I expect you'll be good as new tomorrow."

I followed him across the camp towards the watch tower, whose dark silhouette dominated the sky. We crossed a section of the massive encampment I hadn't seen yet, and passed a forty-foot tarp strung between three trees, sheltering rows and rows of heavy wire cages. I paused to peer at the cages' occupants: Massive war dogs lay panting on straw bedding, waiting patiently for their masters.

"Those are the Mabari," Alistair said from behind me. I drew in my breath; even we in the dust pits had heard of the fearsome warhounds, and their prowess and intelligence. Once, a member of the Orzammar royal court had managed to procure a Mabari, and it had been the marvel of the entire city and its trust in him had gained him much respect. Our own dogs are either utilitarian terriers employed to keep vermin away from the storehouses, or sleek, decorative toys for the rich and powerful.

"Why are they here and not with their people?" I asked.

"Only those ranked lieutenant and higher can keep their hounds in their tents with them," he explained. "Everyone else lives in barracks and their hounds would go nuts, trying to guard their master and his stuff all the time."

He crouched before one cage and the black dog inside thumped its cropped tail in greeting. "Hi, Bosco." He reached his fingers through the bars and the dog leaned its head into his hand for a scratch.

"You two know each other?" I assumed he must, since I wasn't currently dragging him off to the medical tent with a missing hand.

"He belongs to one of the other Wardens. He's a lot friendlier than most war dogs, he lets almost anyone pat him. Most of them only let their master and maybe one or two close friends." He sat back on his heels, shaking his head. "Maker, I want my own Mabari. I've wanted one since I was a boy."

"Why don't you have one?"

He stood up and dusted off his knees. "Because no Mabari's ever wanted me."

There wasn't much I could say to that, so I let him lead me away.

When we crested the watch tower and I looked over the crumbling old wall, I gaped in astonishment at the hugeness of the untamed marshland stretching towards the horizon. A vista like this would of course be impossible underground, and my eyes strained to focus on the distance. Looking more closely, I realized I could see the columns of smoke rising from the hundreds of darkspawn campfires to the south, and the hundreds more in our own army camp to the north.

"You could track the movement of armies from up here," I said, pointing towards the extra-thick column rising from the heart of the darkspawn army.

"Yes, and that's what it used to be for," he told me. "But with the Gray Wardens here, there's no need. The senior Wardens can tell you from miles away where the army is located, its direction and its state of readiness. You'll start to feel them eventually, too, but it will take you some time to develop your sensitivity."

"Useful," I mused, and we settled down to wait as the sun crept below the horizon.

The necessity for fighting in the dark had been explained to me - the darkspawn army would not enter our trap in the light - but still sounded a bit daft, considering how blind humans were at night. Nevertheless, our armies moved into position as night settled over the Wilds, and the advance party of Gray wardens moved out to taunt the darkspawn into a charge.

"What's going on?" Alistair asked eagerly. I narrated for him, telling him who went where, and pointing out the location of the King, easily recognizable even from up here by his gaudy armor.

"And there's Loghain," I finished, pointing up into the wooded hills where they lurked in ambush. "I can't see him personally but I see the army - oh wait, I bet that's him. Look, see the white horse?" Alistair shook his head. "Take my word for it, it's there. Oh! Here come the darkspawn!" I exclaimed, and he leaned out over the wall, straining to see in the darkness.

Our own armies' torches illuminated their progress, but the darkspawn carried no torches and they swept like a black curtain over the greenery of the Wilds. We heard the crash of the armies' meeting, and Alistair gripped my arm.

"Tell me what's happening," he begged, urgency and fear in his voice. "Can you see Duncan?"

I shook my head. "His armor's gray like everyone else's. But there's the King-" I pointed. "Probably Duncan's with him. Look! There's the signal!" A brilliant red flash seared my night-wide eyes, and I blinked furiously as I scrambled after Alistair to light the bonfire. It roared to life, doused in oil as it was, and we ran back to watch the ambush unfold.

Only it didn't.

The white horse I'd seen turned, and trotted back into the woods. Then Loghain's entire army began an organized retreat, moving northward without a second glance. I paused in my ongoing narration in disbelief.

"What now?" Alistair prodded.

"They.. they left," I whispered.

"They _what?_"

"They left! They're running away!" I cried. "Stone's mercy, he's abandoning us!"

Alistair's mouth hung open in disbelief, which gradually transformed into fury. "Traitor!" he roared at Loghain's distant figure.

But I had something else on my mind. Below us, the darkspawn wrought dreadful carnage on the vastly outnumbered army of Gray Wardens and royal guardsmen. Gradually, the black army had surrounded the shrinking knot of desperate men, and now I watched with stomach-clenching fear as darkspawn swarmed into the base of the tower.

"Alistair," I said urgently, tugging at his arm. "Alistair!"

"What?" he snapped.

"Get ready," I warned him. "The tower's been invaded. The darkspawn are coming."

Terror flashed across his face, and I turned from him to cast about us for someplace to hide, someplace to run, anything at all. But the tower's top floor lay empty under the glittering sky. We exchanged a look sick with fear before drawing our weapons and bracing ourselves for an unwinnable battle.

The hoots and screeches of the darkspawn preceded them, and again I was in danger of soiling myself. Then the first of the Glenlocks became visible around the bend in the stairs. Alistair waited until the first had almost reached us, then grimly kicked it over backwards. It fell crashing down the stairs, knocking down several of its packmates. But behind them stood a pack of archers, and they seized the sudden opening and fired all at once.

I was the only target not crouching behind a shield, and five arrows hit me before I knew what had happened. Their force threw me sprawling onto the floor, and for the second time that night, I sank softly into unconsciousness.


	7. Witches of the Wilds

Waking slowly, as rising through murky waters, I was only aware of the soft sighing of wind and the homespun blanket touching my skin. I _should_ have felt stone and pain and heard the clamor of battle. For some time I pondered this inaccuracy of perception.

Maybe it would help if I opened my eyes. I felt a stab of irrational fear that, if I did open my eyes, I would see the tower and the scarred and hideous faces of darkspawn, and they would attack me. Better to lie still, where it was safe.

Wait. I could not possibly be in the tower, or I would be dead. I blinked and focused my sandy eyes with some difficulty on a bare wooden wall. Well, that was a letdown.

With monumental effort, I rolled onto my back. The motion finally woke me completely and I looked around at the inside of an ancient but well-scrubbed hut. A stove in the corner kept the room wonderfully warm, and a pot bubbled merrily. Herbs and flowers hung upside-down in neat bunches along the rafters, scenting the air. Two stools stood by a small table, and there were two beds and two shelves full of books and small wooden boxes: The trappings of two people who had lived their lives in neat, contented isolation.

Then, the door creaked open and a tall and exotically beautiful woman slid silently into the room.

"Ah, your eyes open," she noted in her light, clear voice. "Mother will be pleased."

Memories jostled into place. "Morrigan," I croaked, voice rusty and unused.

"You remember," she said as though surprised. "What else can you recall?"

"Uhm..." I struggled to concentrate. "Stone tower, darkspawn, battle. Alistair. Oh! Where's Alistair?"

I tried to sit up but my vision swam, and I leaned on one elbow for several seconds until it cleared. Then I tried again, more carefully this time, and realized I was naked. I looked at Morrigan and she seemed unconcerned by my nudity, so I ignored it for now. The communal baths in Orzammar had removed any body-shyness I might have had long ago.

Morrigan had waited until I steadied before answering me. "The dim-witted one? He is here, and well, although quite upset."

"I can imagine," I grunted, ignoring the insult for now, trying to scoot to the edge of the bed so I could get up without blacking out. "How long have we been here?"

"A day and a half," she replied. "Your wounds were severe, but nothing Mother could not repair. You will recover fully. Your armor, unfortunately, will not. I have washed your clothing; you will find it and your gear under the bed."

"How did we get here?" I asked as I hung my feet over the bed and stretched.

"Mother transformed herself into a giant bird and plucked you both from the tower, one in each talon," Morrigan answered me. I looked at her sharply and thought I saw a glint of humor in her eyes. Well, if she didn't want to tell me, that was her business.

"Thank you," I told her sincerely. "You have helped us twice now. I owe you." I reached out to touch her hand, but she jerked away.

"'Twas Mother who did most of the work, not I," she spoke quickly, backing away. "She is outside, and will want to speak with you." And with that, she left.

I finished dressing quickly; my tunic was full of holes, and my armor was useless. I sighed and tossed the shredded leather onto the bed. Then I made my way to the door and opened it.

Outside, the sunlight dazzled me even through the cloud cover. Squinting blindly, I let the door bang shut.

"Thank the Maker you're awake!" I heard Alistair's cry, and focused on him as he half-ran towards me. He stopped short and his face was such a welter of conflicting emotions that I couldn't begin to decipher them. I knew what _I_ felt, though, and I was glad as hell I wasn't alone out here. I held my arms up to him, and he bent and enveloped me in a bear hug, burying his face in my hair and squeezing much too tightly for my abused body.

"I was afraid I was the only one left," he whispered, his expression tortured. I would have said something comforting, if I could breathe. Then Flemeth's creaky old voice cut in.

"How very sweet," she cackled. "The last two Gray Wardens in Ferelden, sharing a touching reunion. Now, if you can spare me a moment, we have much to discuss."

Alistair let go of me like I burnt. I crossed to one of the two outdoor chairs and sat heavily.

"I'm incredibly grateful to you, Lady, but I'm so hungry I'm about to shrivel up and blow away," I said. "Do you mind if I eat while we talk?"

"Lady?" Flemeth repeated, sounding amused, while Morrigan clattered around in the kitchen. "I am no lady, girl. Just an old, old woman. An old woman who saved your lives, may I remind you."

"Yes, Morrigan told me. What do you want?" I honestly wanted to know how I could repay her, but she scowled a little. I wasn't at my charming best, apparently. Morrigan brought out a bowl of stew and I immediately burned my tongue on it.

"I want you to stop the Blight," Flemeth said. "The Archdemon will destroy the entire world, including me, without the Wardens. Thus I act out of self interest, not charity."

"But I only just became a Warden," I said, taking a break from shoveling stew into my mouth, "I don't know anything about anything. What chance do just the two of us have against an entire Blight?"

"You have more at your disposal than you think." Flemeth looked meaningfully at Alistair's pack, slung over the back of the chair.

"The treaties," he breathed. "They were still in my pack!"

"Yes!" I exclaimed, grabbing the bag and pulling out the scrolls, safe and sound inside their wooden cases. One had the royal seal of Orzammar, but I didn't recognize the others.

"With those treaties you may gather forces from the Dalish elves, the dwarves, and the Circle of Magi," Flemeth explained patiently. "You must go with all speed to marshal what defense you can. To that end, I give you the services of my daughter."

"But Mother -" Morrigan began.

"You will do as you are told," Flemeth snapped. "You have been itching to get out of the Wilds for years. Now is your chance."

"If you don't mind coming, I'd appreciate your help," I said to Morrigan, who stared at me in consternation.

Alistair gave me a stricken look. "You want to take an _apostate mage_ along? She could be a blood mage - a maleficar!"

"She helped save our lives," I pointed out. "She hasn't hurt us, and if her mother has taught her even a fraction of her knowledge, then she'd be a valuable ally. And we need all the help we can get."

He raked a hand through his hair, and slumped in defeat. Obviously he didn't feel up to an argument. Morrigan's body radiated anger, but Flemeth pierced her with a glare and she threw up her hands.

"Fine," she snapped. "But mind the stew on the stove, Mother. I do not wish to return here to find a burned-down hut."

"You are likely to return here and find the entire Wilds, along with my hut, swallowed up by the Blight, girl," Flemeth said sharply.

Morrigan paled, and I saw a flash of the little girl trying to please. "I - I only meant -" she faltered.

"Yes, I know. Go now, Wardens," Flemeth ordered. "Know that I give you what I value most in all the world, my only daughter. Oh, and this-" She handed me a burlap sack of bread and jerky, and a battered chainmail shirt. "Some armor I ..._found_. 'Tis likely too big, but that matters little with chainmail, no?"

I took the shirt gratefully and went inside to pull on my gambeson to protect my skin from the rough metal. Then I tried to pull the shirt over my head and got stuck with it around my shoulders and my hands over my head. By the Ancestors, this stuff was heavy! How did Alistair wear a full suit of steel all the time and not collapse?

"Help! Ow!" I yelped, getting my hair caught in the metal links. Alistair slammed the door open, saw me and smiled briefly. Then he gently disentangled the mail from my hair and helped me settle it into place. The mail shirt was more like a dress, the hem falling to my knees, and the sleeves hung past my hands and weighed _a ton_.

"Don't you dare laugh," I warned him. He shook his head solemnly, and I noticed his eyes had gone sad again.

"Where should be go?" I asked.

"I don't know," he shrugged. "I guess the closest town would be Lothering, but I haven't a clue how to get there without a map."

"I can take you there," Morrigan piped up from the doorway.

"Great, then what?" He looked so lost, I hated harassing him for answers, but I was totally helpless on the surface.

"I - we could go to Redcliffe," he said eventually. "I know Arl Eamon, the lord there. He raised me during my early childhood, and he's a good man. He would never support _Loghain_." His face twisted with hatred when he spoke the name.

"Excellent," I said, feeling better already. Family ties would help; during civil war, you never knew who to trust. Dust Town had seen several complete overturns of the criminal power structure, and during those times, even best friends turned against each other.

"We have a plan? Good," Morrigan said with authority. "Now follow me." And she turned and strode from the hut without a backward glance.

"Thank you again," I said hastily to Flemeth as I scurried after her into the marsh, listening to the comforting rattle of Alistair's armored self at my back.

The two of us slogged through the marsh behind Morrigan, the surefooted mage stepping confidently along hillocks of grass and half-hidden stones while I slipped frequently into puddles and mud. Often, apparently solid ground would turn out to be shallow water completely covered in scum and tiny, floating plants. Within minutes, my boots were filled with greenish-brown sludge and felt like they weighed about forty pounds each. Judging from the squelching sounds behind me, Alistair was having similar problems.

As if wet feet weren't bad enough, after hour or so I felt a fat droplet of water fall on the back of my neck, trickling unpleasantly down below my collar. I whipped my head around and glared at Alistair, sure he was playing tricks out of boredom, but he was keeping his eyes on the ground and his face had returned to the flat, numb expression it had worn this morning. Two more droplets landed on my head. I stared accusingly up at the lowering sky, looking for a dripping tree or something, when another drop hit me square in the eye.

"Hey!" I stopped dead to pull off a glove and rub at my eye, "Who's throwing water at me?"

Alistair looked up blankly. "What?"

Then I heard a rustling sound and suddenly the air was full of falling water. "By Astyth's armored tits," I cried, appalled, "there's water coming right out of the air!"

He stared for a moment, then looked up at the sky. Morrigan came striding up behind me. "Fool dwarf, have you never heard of rain? I know you grew up in a hole in the ground, but truly weather is not a complete mystery to you!"

Comprehension dawned on Alistair's face. "That's right, I never thought - but of course it wouldn't rain in Orzammar."

I folded my arms and hunched my shoulders, trying to keep the accursed 'rain' from dripping down my neck. "Of course I've heard of ...weather. Everyone knows about weather. I've just, you know, never seen it."

Morrigan rolled her eyes at my foolishness. "Well, you had best become accustomed to it. Ferelden is known for its rain and its mud, and if we are at this 'quest' of yours for long, you will see snow, as well."

"Right, snow, of course," I lied, embarrassed. "That will be ...fun?"

She narrowed her eyes at me, then apparently decided I was serious. "It can be amusing, I suppose. Well? Are you done with your little outburst, or shall we stand here and gape at the sky until the darkspawn have found us?" Without waiting for an answer, she turned back to her path that only she could see, and strode away again.

"Do you have anything to keep the rain off? A cloak, or at least a hood?" Alistair asked, digging a large piece of brown leather out of his pack. The leather looked slick and heavy, yet supple. The sparkling raindrops beaded up on it and rolled off, leaving it dry. My eyes widened.

"No, but I want one! Where did you get it?"

He shrugged. "They're everywhere. You can get one in Lothering."

"Is it expensive?" I asked, doubtfully. "Surely such a thing is patented."

He looked startled. "Patented? No, we don't do that here. All tanners can make oiled leather. It's just leather soaked in oil, then dried."

"Oh." I felt stupid again, and didn't like it. "I thought it was enchanted. Well, I will buy one first thing in Lothering." _And I will hope I can afford it_, I added silently.

He threw the cloak around his shoulders and turned up the hood. It looked marvelously warm and snug and I felt miserable, wet and ignorant as Alistair turned to follow Morrigan and I scurried after him. I kept my eyes down and hunched my shoulders up against the back of my helmet so no water would leak under my shirt, but it was a losing battle. After a few minutes, Alistair looked over his shoulder at me and frowned.

"It's probably going to rain all day. Are you just going to get wet, or what?"

This was too unfair. "Do you have a better idea?" I snapped. "I have nothing except the armor on my back! I don't even have a shield to put over my head! My chainmail is full of holes and the rain gets in everywhere."

He frowned again, then held out his left arm, holding his cloak open. I stared.

"Come on, you're small enough that you can share mine until you get your own," he explained, waving the edge of the cloak invitingly. Water droplets showered off it like jewels.

I wasn't about to refuse, and scrambled under the cloak immediately, grabbing the edge of the front opening and pulling it tightly against my cheek to seal out the rain.

He plodded through the marsh in an oblivious straight line, his eyes downcast and filling again with a kind of numb horror. After a while I wondered why I didn't feel worse, myself. Eventually I decided that the entire idea - the Gray Wardens, a free life with respect and dignity, even Duncan and his kindness - had been a kind of dream to me. A wonderful dream, where a knight rode in on a beautiful horse and rescued me from a terrible fate, sweeping me away to a place where I was worthy to join a brotherhood of nobility and honor. But it was still just a dream, and now real life had come rushing back, and once again I was tired and hungry and isolated.

Somehow, this thought actually made me feel a little better. Desperation was normal to me, mere survival a goal I understood. Granted, "survival" in this case meant action of a far grander scale than I had ever undertaken, but still, the similarity was there.

Some hours later we emerged from the Stone-forsaken marsh and began to follow a recognizable path on good packed earth. As the rain finally tapered off and the sun's setting rays stained the tattered clouds a bloody red, I asked Morrigan how far we had left to go.

"We'd have only an hour to go, if you kept a good pace," she sniped. "But, at this rate, we have four hours yet remaining."

"Four hours," I groaned. I felt bone-tired and my toes had gone numb in my soaked boots. My stomach reminded me that it, too, had needs.

"I'm tired and hungry," I whispered, despite myself. I hated how whiny I sounded but I couldn't help it. "My chest hurts," I added. If I was going to whine, I might as well be thorough.

Alistair suddenly looked up, eyes intense. "Morrigan, I thought you said she was healed," he accused.

"I said she would be fine," she replied, "I never said she was restored to full health. A body can't recover from five arrows in the chest without feeling some ill-effects."

"Maker's breath, we've been walking in the cold and rain for five hours straight with her still injured. Andraste protect us from our foolishness and pride." Alistair kept talking but I couldn't hear him and I had a suspicion he was not actually talking to me - or about me. He paced agitatedly a few times, then set off down the trail again.

Mystified, I followed for several more minutes, until he came to a halt beside the rising crown of roots from a downed tree. The ground was dry and piled with leaves beneath the protection of the great tree's roots. He dumped his pack on the ground and pulled out the loaf of rain-damp bread and rabbit jerky Flemeth had given us, handing the food to me before uncorking the water flask and pressing that into my hands, too.

"Here," he said, "you eat first. I'm not hungry." He stood leaning against the side of our makeshift shelter, watching me eat, his attention vaguely unsettling.

"Do you intend to spend the night here?" Morrigan asked after I finally finished eating - it turned out I was ravenous.

I prodded the now-empty water flask listlessly. "I don't know if I'm good for another four hours of walking," I finally admitted. My legs felt shivery and weak and my head had grown heavy.

"Then I shall make my own camp some ways apart," she announced. "Do not be offended, but I prefer my own space." With that, she marched away until she was only barely visible in the deepening shadows... and disappeared.

"Maker forbid the witch help keep watch," Alistair exploded. "Not that I'd trust her to guard us, anyway. I cannot believe she would have kept you walking until you dropped dead."

"I'm hardly about to drop dead," I mumbled as I pushed the leaves around into a kind of nest.

"No thanks to her," he growled. "I'll take first watch. You can sleep."

As if there was another option. I didn't so much fall asleep as drop unconscious.


	8. The Howl

An unknowable time later, I became aware of the cold ground, the stiffness of my body, and something heavy draped over me. I opened my eyes to the gray pre-dawn light and slowly sat up, every joint creaking like an old man's. Alistair's cloak fell from my shoulders and I looked up to see him still standing exactly where he had been, minus his cloak.

"What was this for?" I asked, holding it up. He looked terrible, eyes red-rimmed and deeply shadowed.

"You were shivering," he said shortly, examining my face. "How are you feeling now?"

"Stiff from sleeping on the ground, but otherwise fine. Why didn't you wake me for my watch?"

"You needed the sleep." He finally looked away and I almost didn't hear the next thing he said. "And I was afraid of the dreams I would have."

I stood and handed his cloak back. We ate the rest of the bread in silence, then were about to look for Morrigan when a wolf trotted across the path towards us. With a shout of alarm, Alistair snatched up his sword, but the wolf shimmered and blurred into the shape of the witch.

"Shall we go?" she asked, as if nothing had happened. Alistair sheathed his sword with unnecessary force and a snort of disgust, but I was fascinated. This was the first real magic I had seen performed, and it didn't seem dangerous - it looked awesome.

"How did you do that?" I demanded, as we set out again for Lothering.

"Flemeth taught me much," she answered, setting a fast pace on the firm earth, "including the ability to change my shape."

"Do you spend a lot of time as an animal?" I asked, curious.

"Some. You walk through the Wilds and you think you know it, but I have smelled it with the nose of a wolf, seen it with the eyes of a hawk, crept through it and owned it in the body of a cat. Some would find it monstrous. Do you?"

"I think it sounds very useful," I assured her. "I've always wished I could run with the freedom of four strong legs."

"A most practical viewpoint," she approved. "If only everyone felt as you do." She cast a glare in Alistair's direction.

"I grew up in Orzammar," I explained. "We don't have the Chantry preaching to us about the dangers of magic, and we have no mages of our own to worry about. And it helps to be immune to lyrium and separate from the Fade."

"That is true," she mused. "I have never met a dwarf before. It had not occurred to me that your lack of magic would have let your minds stay open. Perhaps one day I should journey to Orzammar and see what life is like without the Chantry and its Templars." She glared again at the back of Alistair's head.

I wondered how long I would be able to keep them from each other's throats.

About an hour later, the path we followed joined a much broader road, which had once been neatly paved but now had grass growing through the stones. This road in turn became a tributary to an immense highway. It reminded me, with its arches and massive stones, of the mighty Deep Roads where I had once crept, searching for treasure to keep us fed another day, imagining every sound a darkspawn ready to chew my face off, and keeping myself sane by making jokes in my head about fighting back by getting stuck in their teeth.

The skies cleared gradually as we emerged from the last of the wilderness and into a land that had once been well-tended farmlands like those I had passed through with Duncan only days before. I felt like it had been years since then, and the land looked like it felt the same way. Smoke rose from smoldering barns and silos, young wheat lay trampled into the ground, and occasionally we passed a macabre caricature of a scarecrow: The limp body of a farmer impaled on a darkspawn spear and propped up at the side of the road to ooze slowly onto the paving stones. The cavalier crows crows pecked for carrion and stared at us belligerently as we passed.

The three of us walked in silence through the stench of war.

We were passing yet another defiled farmstead when a long, drawn-out howl split the air, a wail of longing and absolute despair. I looked sharply to Alistair, and he pointed to the neat white house a short distance from the road.

"There's a dog in there," he said sadly. "Sounds like he misses his person."

The dog's call trailed off; after a pause for breath, he howled again, and the naked heartbreak in his cry filled my eyes with tears. I couldn't help but turn off the road toward the house.

The dog's song broke off when he heard me step on the front stairs, and he growled a warning. I froze, looked over my shoulder and saw Alistair hovering nervously a few steps behind me, Morrigan tapping her foot in obvious impatience on the highway's stones.

The odds seemed good that if I opened that door, I'd need a new hand – or maybe a new jugular. I hesitated, but when the dog's growl turned into a painful, wracking cough followed by the unmistakable sound of vomiting, I stepped forward quickly and pushed the weatherbeaten door open.

The room reeked of stale vomit and rotting blood. A light brown Mabari hound glared at me from where he crouched protectively over his master's body on a narrow cot in the far corner. He lunged at me, but his forelegs buckled underneath him and he plowed face-first into the floor with a grunt of pain. When he didn't get up, I approached cautiously.

His eyes were glazed, his body trembling slightly as he panted. His tongue lolled out and was dangerously pale with shock. I reached out, ignoring his pitiful growl, and touched his flank; he burned with fever.

"Alistair, help," I called, and he ran up the stairs with his sword drawn. "Not that kind of help, put that away. What's wrong with this dog?"

Alistair crouched and touched the dog's face, looking closely at his eyes. The dog shivered weakly. Then he stood and went over to examine the dead body, and then opened the back door and looked outside.

"There," he said, pointing. "The dog tried to defend his master from darkspawn raiders. See? He killed those three – the other one looks like his master shot it with a crossbow. But he wasn't fast enough, his master took this gut wound -" he went back to the body and showed me the deep gash. "That's a slow death. Probably just died, that's why the dog howled."

"But the dog's not hurt, why is he sick?" I ran my hands over him, double-checking for injuries, but found nothing.

"He got darkspawn blood in his mouth when he bit them. He's dying from the taint." Alistair knelt at the dog's side and stroked his soft ears. "Sometimes Mabari recover, and then they're immune, sort of like Gray Wardens. But it doesn't look like this guy's gonna make it."

"You should put it out of its misery," Morrigan said from where she leaned against the doorframe. "We do not have time to attempt to cure him."

I looked up at her quickly. "Cure him? Can we do that?"

She looked like she could have kicked herself for giving that away. Reluctantly, she nodded. "There is a flower that may help. But if you think I am going to waste time treating a mangy beast, you are sorely mistaken."

"He's not mangy," Alistair crooned softly, stroking the dog's face again. Its glazed eyes drooped shut. "He's a brave boy. Yes he is. He's a good boy..."

His voice trailed off, and a drop of water landed on the dog's coarse fur. I glanced at his face and saw him wipe his cheek, and he turned away from me, reddening. I thought of the dog's vigil over his master, how he had defended the body even as he himself died a slow and agonizing death, and my heart pounded with sudden fury. I stood up.

"I don't believe you," I told her, letting my anger show. "You can't cure darkspawn taint. Nobody can."

"I assure you, I can," she sniffed, pushing off the doorframe to stand to her full height. She towered over me.

"You lying bitch," I snarled, clenching my fists. "You mud-eating savage, you can't do it."

"Yes, I can," she flared. "Flemeth taught me all the herbs of the Wilds. You cave ticks know nothing of the powers they hold."

"Prove it, or you can just take your lying ass back home to your mom." I glared at her and folded my arms. I'd played my hand.

Her eyes flickered, and then she smiled. "Oh, very nicely done."

She waved her hands and a floating, translucent image appeared before me, showing a white flower with a red center. "Help me find this. Your pet will be fine without you. Oh, and the dog, too."

"Wow!" I cried, impressed with the illusion, and she smirked at me before turning and shimmering into her wolf form to scent out the flower.

"Do you want to stay with him?" I asked Alistair, and he nodded, still not looking at me.

I ran down the stairs and followed Morrigan. She pointed with her muzzle toward a narrow game trail, and I obediently turned down it to start looking while she searched elsewhere.

Honestly, one plant looked very much like another to me, and I wandered around, picking any flower that even remotely resembled the one she'd shown me. When my stomach told me several hours had passed, I turned and ran back up the path to the house with my armful of random white blossoms.

When I re-entered the house, Morrigan was already there, mixing something in a pot over the stove. Alistair had taken the body on its blood-soaked cot to the barn, and moved the dog to a thick, braided rug near the stove's warmth. He'd also opened all the windows, and a fresh breeze blew through the house, helping to dispel the fog of pain and death.

"Finally, you return," Morrigan said when she heard me open the door. "Your Warden's mooning about is beginning to fray my nerves. Take him outside."

"Do you want any of these?" I asked, dumping the flowers on a table.

She looked over her shoulder at them and burst out laughing. She turned and picked up one of my collection. "This is poisonous." She tossed it aside and picked up another. "And this one is a mushroom."

"Fine, I get it, I'm not good at herbs." I went to check on the dog. He lay flat on the rug, trembling and breathing rapid, shallow breaths. I met Alistair's concerned gaze with one of my own, and shrugged helplessly.

Eventually Morrigan finished her work and handed me a small bottle of thick white goop. "Make him drink it," she told me. "I am done here. The stink is intolerable."

And with that, she turned and left. I heard her footsteps shift from boots to paws after a few steps, and fade away. I bent over the dog's head and lifted his heavy muzzle into my lap, pulling his lips back from his teeth so I could drip the medicine into his mouth. He swallowed reflexively, and gagged. I clamped my hands over his jaws to prevent him spitting it out, and he swallowed again, then went limp.

"Is he dead?" Alistair gasped, then blushed in embarrassment when he saw the dog's ribs rise and fall. I gently lifted the furry head and shifted around until I was comfortable on the rug, then laid it back on my lap to pet his velvety ears and soft, jowly throat.

"We should name him," Alistair said, watching.

I shook my head. "Not until we know if he'll live."

He pulled back like I'd slapped him, and leaned on the far wall, looking at his hands, his jaw tight.

Time passed. I thought the dog's breathing was getting a bit deeper, and maybe he was sleeping now, not just unconscious. Or maybe it was wishful thinking. When the sun's rays slanted golden through the west windows, Alistair suddenly surged to his feet and stomped outside to the barn.

After several minutes, he came back with his arms full of eggs and started rebuilding the fire in the stove. He set some water to boil and sat back down again with an explosive sigh.

"How can we justify this?" he asked. I thought his question might be rhetorical, so I didn't answer. But when he scrubbed angrily at his face with his hands and sniffed, I realized I'd been wrong.

I'd made us stay here because I thought Alistair needed it. We'd watched everyone in his Gray Warden family die, and he'd been helpless to do anything about it. Then he'd waited two more days to find out whether I'd die, too, and again, he'd been helpless. Today we'd walked past body after rotting body, all victims who had died because of our failure to stop the darkspawn army.

"We couldn't save anyone at Ostagar, but maybe we can save this guy," I told him. "We're not leaving until we've done our best."

He bit his lip and nodded, before going back to the stove and dropping the eggs into the boiling water. I watched the dog's eyes move under his lids as he dreamed, and realized I wasn't only thinking of Alistair. The sick feeling in my stomach lessened a little when I imagined the dog running and playing, healthy again because of us.

Night fell with no sign of Morrigan, and I worried, though I didn't let it show. We carried the dog upstairs to a larger bedroom, and laid him on the bed. Then I strung noisemaker traps across both doors and the stairway, using pots and pans as the alarm and a roll of fishing twine as the wire.

"There," I said, testing the last one that stretched across the top stair. "Now we don't have to keep watch, as long as we sleep in our armor. No darkspawn's going to make it past all of those. They're better at making traps than disarming them. Shaky fingers."

The dog's fever had gone, which I took as a good sign, but now I worried he'd get cold. So, I climbed up on the bed and curled up against him, pulling the quilt over us both. Alistair stood looking at us for a while until I made a shooing gesture at him, hoping he'd go and rest.

He flopped into the room's only chair and threw his cloak over himself, and I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

At some point during the night, though, I heard him mumble something and then jerk awake, stumbling to his feet in confusion and fear. I blinked sleepily at him as he rubbed at his eyes and shuddered. He must've had a nightmare, poor guy. He paced around the room several times before returning to his chair, but he sat upright now, staring out the tiny window as though determined not to sleep again.

A bizarre screeching cry woke me up again when the sky had lightened to silver. I flinched and started upright before I recognized it as some sort of extra-annoying birdcall. Alistair watched me from his chair. Even his hair looked tired, stuck down over his forehead instead of standing up straight like it usually did.

The dog sighed and stretched, and instantly we were both totally focused on him. He blinked and rolled on his back, looking at me with intelligent eyes.

"Good morning," I said softly. I didn't know what else to say. How do dogs say good morning? I got my answer when the dog laid his ears back and snuffled my face ecstatically, licking at my chin and wiggling his stumpy tail. I wrinkled my nose but smiled despite the slobber.

Alistair came over and reached out to rub his belly, but the dog stiffened and gave him a hard look. Alistair pulled his hand away and my heart ached at the hurt in his eyes. I felt terrible – if I'd told Alistair to sleep with him instead of doing it myself, would the dog have bonded to _him,_ instead? Did I just steal his Mabari?

"Be nice to Daddy Alistair," I whispered into the dog's attentive ear. "He helped you, too. Remember?"

The dog eyed me for a moment before turning his blunt muzzle towards Alistair again and sniffing the air. Alistair held his hand to the inquisitive nose and the dog struggled to sit up, wagging his tail under the quilt and laying his ears back submissively.

"Look, he remembers my smell," Alistair said happily, petting the dog's face as he licked his hands. I breathed a sigh of relief and got up to look for breakfast, when I heard a crash of falling pots from downstairs, followed by a woman's loud cursing.

"Sorry, Morrigan," I called, trotting down the stairs. "I set traps. They won't hurt you, they're just loud. Where'd you go?"

"Around," she said evasively, disentangling herself from the tripwire. "How is our patient?"

The dog answered her question by staggering dizzily down the stairs after me, woofing under his breath at Morrigan. I reached out to steady him until he got to the floor, where he made a beeline for his bowl of water and began slurping it up noisily. Morrigan made a satisfied sound.

"You told me so," I said preemptively.

She scowled. "You take all the fun out of it."


	9. Lothering Pays for Loghain's Sins

_Sincerest thanks to everyone who has read and commented on my story. I respect that your time is valuable; I am deeply honored that you chose to spend it reading my work, and I'm not being sarcastic, here. I take my responsibility to you seriously and do my best to ensure that you enjoy your time with Latitia._

_With that in mind, please, please feel free to tell me if you aren't enjoying something I'm doing. You know, things like "I'm sick of hearing about the horses" or or "How many different kinds of demons are you going to describe? Enough already!" I WILL listen. Although, I certainly don't mind if you tell me nice things, too ;)_

_I'm perhaps being a glutton for punishment saying this here, on this specific chapter, though - it's my least favorite of all 16 I've got so far (yes, there's more coming! Hopefully that is good news!) because frankly I hate Lothering. Go ahead and rip it apart. Much more original content is coming in the next chapter, and after that? ZOMBIES!_

* * *

Morrigan fed the dog some kind of tea, and he recovered strength rapidly as he ate his way through his lost master's pantry. She said the hunger was normal and healthy, so we just kept shoving food in front of him until around noon, when the dog nudged the door open and trotted outside, looking back at us over his shoulder.

"I don't think he wants to stay here," Alistair said, picking up his gear. "It must make him sad."

Before we left, though, I ran out back to rifle through the pockets of the dead darkspawn. Mostly they had only the usual darkspawn garbage, equipment cannibalized from their victims and thus full of holes and dents, but one had a small pouch of coins, another was carrying a polished chunk of malachite, and the archer's bow could probably be resold. I slung the bow across my shoulder, turning to find Alistair watching with distaste.

"How can you touch them like that?" he demanded.

Morrigan shrugged. "It is eminently practical. We need gold and equipment, and they are our enemies."

"What she said," I muttered. I hoped this would not be a big deal for him. I hadn't even stopped to think that someone who hadn't grown up in the seedy underbelly of Orzammar might have the luxury of being squeamish about the dead.

We followed the dog out to the highway and continued our journey, discussing what we'd buy in Lothering. "And I need to buy a cloak," I added. "In the meantime, do you think I could trouble you for yours again? I'm going to look like a boiled beet if I let the sun shine on me much longer."

"I don't know, I might like to see that," he teased. "You'd look good as a beet. The cook at the Chantry had an awfully good recipe for pickled beets."

"Ah, so you've rejoined us," Morrigan said. "Falling on your sword in grief seemed like too much trouble, I take it?"

"Leave him alone!" I snapped angrily. "Another comment like that and I'll make you walk at the back of the group with the _dog_."

Her mouth hung open in disbelief for a moment, then she huffed and strode on ahead. The dog, however, had heard himself mentioned and began prancing along beside me, fairly vibrating with eagerness for attention. I scritched his head, and he leaned his ear into my hand; I rubbed the ear harder, and he let out a soft moan of pleasure. I smiled.

"Can we name him now?" Alistair asked, reaching in front of me to join in on the dog-rubbing.

"Rocky," I said instantly.

"That was easy," he laughed. "But isn't it a bit... well, straightforward? I mean, at least you didn't name him Stone -"

"I had a pet nug named Rocky when I was little," I explained. "I kept him for a couple months before my mother found out about him and ate him."

"_Ate_ him?"

"Well, yeah, nugs are delicious," I said casually. "Meat is hard enough to get in Dust Town without your dumb kid trying to keep it as a pet. At least the nug didn't need to be fed; he just ate whatever garbage I found. What I really wanted was a dog, but only the nobler castes could afford to keep a pet carnivore." I patted Rocky's shoulder happily. "If ma could see this bad boy, her jaw would hit the floor."

Rocky whined and cocked his head, ears wilting a little.

"Oh, sorry, I meant _good boy_," I clarified. "You're a very _good boy_." He wagged his stumpy tail.

We passed a sign saying "Lothering, 1/2 mile" and picked up the pace a bit, hopeful of arriving in time for a late lunch. But when we came to a narrow bridge over a ravine, we discovered evidence not only of the lawlessness rampant in the wake of the King's death but also a grim reminder that the darkspawn army was hot on our heels, its raiders ranging through the countryside in search of food.

A troupe of human bandits had erected a barricade over the bridge, but the bandits themselves had then fallen prey to a Darkspawn scouting party. They had evidently tried to hide behind their barricade but most had either not made it back there or fallen to Glenlock arrows. One bandit still fought desperately, alongside a pair of stout dwarven merchants - probably his erstwhile victims - but the trio was cornered and only still alive because most of the darkspawn had stopped to snack on the dead. The terrified mules still hitched to the wagon plunged and squealed, adding to the confusion.

We broke into a run and fell upon the darkspawn. Two died before the others had looked up from their meal, and three more fell in rapid succession as Alistair's blade flashed and he roared with fury. Morrigan uttered an incantation and a Glenlock turned snowy-white, and toppled off the edge of the bridge to shatter on the rocks below. Rocky darted back and forth across the bridge, harrying the remaining darkspawn, throwing them to the ground where I finished them off. Finally the last Hurlock, a massive beast and the only one who'd remained focused on its original prey, turned away from the last bandit's bloody corpse and bellowed a battlecry so ferocious it seemed to freeze the blood in my veins.

Morrigan unleashed her magic against it, and it shuddered, then shook the frost off its body, its skin cracked and bleeding beneath the ice. It swung a huge blow at the charging Alistair, who caught it on his shield but was hurled across the road and into an overturned wagon. Rocky threw his head back and howled, a dreadful sound, then leapt. His jaws closed on the beast's shoulder and his momentum swung its body in a wide arc, but the Hurlock stayed on its feet and Rocky lost his grip, teeth scoring deep scratches in the rusty plates of its armor but doing no damage to the flesh beneath.

But now the monster's back was to me, and I struck, tearing the holes in its armor wider as I jammed both daggers in as hard as I could. I'd barely gotten them half way in, though, and I knew I'd missed the killing stroke when it spun to face me and tore the daggers, still wedged in its body, out of my grip.

Its spiked bracer caught me on the arm and ground the metal links against my skin, leaving them slick with blood. It screamed with rage and I froze in momentary panic at the loss of my weapons. It reared back to deliver an overhead blow and I braced myself to dodge, when Alistair returned to the fray and launched his entire bodyweight into the beast's chest. They both crashed to the ground, and the Hurlock shuddered and then lay still: Their combined weight had done what I couldn't, and beast had fallen against the daggers with enough force to drive them into its heart.

I held out a hand and helped Alistair up. "Now that was some serious teamwork!" I congratulated him, clapping him on the back while he grinned.

"Yes, it is good to see the legendary mental fortitude of the Templars in action. Tell me, did you stop once to breathe, or did you maintain your mindless bellow of rage for the entire battle?" Morrigan asked dryly.

I turned on her with a snarl. "You will stop that _now_, bitch, or I will silence you myself! I warned you once and I swear by my Ancestors I will not warn you again!"

Morrigan blinked a few times, flushing. Then she turned on her heel and stormed off.

"Witch is just mad because you killed it and she didn't," I growled. I liked Morrigan, I really did, but my fellow Warden had to come first, and her cruelty to him was unacceptable. "Seriously, Alistair, she can't stand that you showed her up. You did awesome - how many kills was that? Five? Six?"

He grinned again, still red with embarrassment but apparently happy to get my support. "I think that Alpha should count twice."

"Speaking of which, help me get my daggers back," I grunted as I laboriously rolled the brute over. Alistair braced a foot on its back and wrenched the daggers free. Rocky barked.

"Oh and how could I forget _you_!" I cried, rubbing his shoulders vigorously. "What a good dog, turning that Hurlock around! What a _smart_ dog! What a good pack we have, oh _yes_!" He quivered with ecstasy.

"Er, sorry to bother you," came a small voice from behind a wagon, "but... thank you?"

I stood and looked behind the wagon. The two dwarves climbed out from where they had hidden under it, wringing their hands in anxious gratitude.

"My name is Bodahn, and this is my son, Sandal," the elder dwarf introduced himself. "You came in the nick of time, my friend."

The name stirred a memory and I frowned. Bodahn, Bodahn... Oh!

"Are you Bodahn who used to sell crafting supplies in the smith quarter?" I came closer and wiped the blood off my face, brushing my hair back so he could see me. "Remember me? Freshest frost-rocks in Orzammar, eh?"

"Latitia!" He clasped my hand in delight. "How are you? And how is the lovely Rica?"

"I'm fine, I'm a Gray Warden now," I told him proudly. "Rica was fine last I saw her, too."

Bodahn looked at me speculatively. "Tell me, where are you traveling? Perhaps we could stick together. Safety in numbers, right?"

I glanced at Alistair, who shrugged. "I'm not sure, good sir," I told him finally. "Our travels are likely to be long and winding. I doubt they will be suitable for a merchantman's route."

"Oh, well," Bodahn sighed, "it was worth asking. Before you go, can I offer you anything from my stores? I have quite a few rare and magical items, collected from the Deep Roads themselves!"

I laughed. "Probably some of them are from me," I said.

"Oh, of course!" he exclaimed. "I forgot, thank you! I would be out of a job without you and your compatriots. Please, have a look."

I pawed through his box, but everything in it was way out of our price range.

"I'm sorry, but what we're really looking for is camping supplies," I explained. "Do you have a tent, bedrolls, that sort of thing?"

"Hmm. My son and I usually sleep in the wagon," he mused, "but I could give you a nice big tripod pot. It's for cooking over a fire."

"That would be wonderful, thank you."

Bodahn handed me a large steel pot, and refused to accept any payment. Then, with a wave, he and his son returned to their wagon and began trundling slowly northward. I started looting the many bodies scattering the bridge. Alistair grimaced and looked at the view, ignoring me. I found quite a few coins, some semiprecious gems, and a strange little golden figurine.

I gestured for Alistair and Rocky to follow me and led us across the ravine. As we walked, I turned the sculpture over in my hands, examining it, eventually concluding it must depict some ancient Goddess. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Alistair watching with interest, eyes fixed on the glittering figurine. Impulsively, I held it out to him.

"Is that for me? Really?" he cried, delighted. "Wow!" He held the little thing up to get a close look at it. I tried not to stare. Frankly, I thought him a little weird to be this thrilled over a simple carved figurine. To each his own, I suppose.

The farming hamlet of Lothering squatted just uphill of a flood plain encircled by a bend in the Korcari River. The fields rippled with young green wheat, and the town's windmill stood atop a knoll, turning gracefully in the light breeze. The predations of the darkspawn had been turned back at the edge of the village, its Chantry and associated Templars having mounted a savage defense, backed by crowds of desperate refugees armed with everything from hunting longbows to thrown rocks.

Inside that perimeter, clusters of lean-tos and other makeshift shelters marked the squatting grounds of various groups of refugees, most centered around the groaning wounded. The town reeked of blood and putrefying wounds.

"This is a lot worse than I thought it would be," Alistair said finally.

"This was probably a foraging mission, since they're gone now," I said.

"No, it was a test of the town's defenses. I can ..._feel_ the army moving. It feels like a sort of weight on the edge of my mind. If that makes any sense. Duncan would be able to explain it properly, and give us more information, too - the senior Wardens have more developed senses. He said he could hear the Archdemon's call when it came."

"I heard it, too, during my Joining," I told him, hoping to prevent him dwelling on Duncan. "Is that normal?"

He thought for a moment. "I don't know," he admitted. "I didn't hear anything. I saw lots of flashes of light and felt all creepy."

"Well, 'creepy' is a pretty accurate description, if a bit understated. Maybe it was different for me because I'm a dwarf. Have there been many dwarven Wardens?"

"I've never met one," he said, "but I'm sure it's not unheard-of. Duncan has gone to Orzammar before, but not for a long time, and I don't know if he brought anyone back. He said most dwarves don't want to leave their homes."

"That's true," I agreed. "Most of the warriors he would have met would be members of the warrior caste, and they would be sworn to stay and defend the city from the darkspawn that are always present in the Deep Roads. Nobody would have thought to look in Dust Town for Warden material."

"Dust Town?" he repeated, looking down at me curiously, and I cursed my slip of the tongue.

"It's a slum," I muttered. "For the casteless – the dwarves who have no place in society."

"Oh," he said quietly, and had the good sense not to pry as we passed through the Chantry's thick stone walls to warn the local militia of the army's approach.

Inside, a harried-looking general was issuing directives to soldiers, Templars, and emergency medics alike. I waited for him to finish discussing the allocation of sleeping quarters before tapping on his shoulder.

"You need to organize an evacuation," I told him. "We just had an encounter with a fresh batch of darkspawn patrols, and my Gray Warden friend here says the army is moving this way."

"I cannot ask all these people to simply abandon their homes," he said stiffly.

"Then they'll die. At least let them know a battle is coming. Let them decide for themselves whether to stay or go," I urged.

"I will take what you say under consideration," he said flatly. "Now, is there anything else you require?"

"Yes," I was getting irritated with this man. "We need food and -"

"Go down the street to the inn," he said, waving me away.

I turned my back on the man and stalked off, furious at his stupidity and trying to ignore the feeling that if Duncan had been there instead of me, the man would have listened. We walked down the town's main street, past a row of small houses, all leaning wearily against each other and filled to bursting with hopeless-looking refugees.

Near the town's east gate hung a filthy gibbett, its single huge occupant's gaze fixed on the horizon in grim, determined silence. "Hey," I asked him curiously, "What're you in for?"

"Leave me alone," he growled, directing an intimidating stare at me. "I deserve my fate. Let me die without your inane platitudes."

"Look at this proud creature, imprisoned at the mercy of the darkspawn by the ignorant men of this village! Latitia, it is wrong to imprison this proud and fearsome warrior. Let us release him," Morrigan urged. I was surprised at the vehemence in her voice - but not moved by it.

I shrugged. "Man wants to die. There's plenty of people here who want to live. I'm not wasting our limited resources saving someone who doesn't want to be saved." The prisoner sighed and resumed ignoring us, and we left him behind as we made for the welcoming column of smoke from the tavern's ovens. Morrigan lagged behind, muttering angrily under her breath.

Standing around outside the tavern were a group of gossiping farmers, who looked relatively well-off. I guessed they were locals, not refugees. One of the men wore a broad-brimmed straw hat held against the wind by a string tied under his chin. My eyes narrowed with covetousness.

Tapping him on the elbow, I made my cutest face and said, "Excuse me, sir, but I absolutely love your hat. I really need a hat like that, you see, or I get sunburned, being a dwarf and all, and I lost mine. I'd pay good money for a hat like that. Do you know of anyplace I can get one?"

The man smiled at me. I knew I looked goofy, acting cute and girlish while covered in bloodstained chainmail, but I also knew from Rica that human men thought dwarven women were oh-so-adorable, even childlike, and I hoped the man would be inspired to help poor little me. Specifically, I hoped he would be inspired to give me his hat.

"Well now, sweet thing, we wouldn't want your pretty little face getting burned! I don't rightly know where you'd find another hat, seeing as I made this one myself outta last year's wheat stalks, but you know what? I can make myself another. Here, honey, you can have this one." And he removed the hat and placed it gently on my head.

"Oooh, thank you sooo much," I squealed, clasping his hand. "Please let me pay you for it!"

"Aw, I don't know that there's any need of that," the man started, but I became aware of Alistair's deepening frown.

"Here," I said hastily, unslinging the darkspawn bow and pressing it into his hands. "I was planning to sell this, but you can use it to defend the town instead. If you don't want it, you can give it to the militiamen, how's that? It's the least I could do, you've been sooo nice."

The man accepted the bow with the excuse that the town needed it, and I unwrapped Alistair's cloak from my shoulders and handed it back with my thanks.

"You weren't really going to manipulate him into just _giving_ you his hat, were you?" he said, holding my elbow and looking concerned.

"Ah..." My brain worked furiously. Of course I meant him to just give it to me; he wanted to do it! I get a hat, and he gets to feel like an awesome guy, where's the wrong? But I could see this was not going to be the right answer for honest, open, _male_ Alistair. "Well, I thought he wouldn't take anything for it at first, but then I remembered the bow. I think it's fair, don't you? It's a perfectly good bow." There, a truth he would like.

Sure enough, he nodded and looked relieved. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have even asked."

Satisfied, I finally opened the door to the tavern. Warm, humid air washed out through the door, bringing mouthwatering scents of baking bread. I paused for a moment in the doorway, savoring it as I took in the scene. Dark wood paneling covered every surface, scarred and battered but clean. All the heavy round tables were full, and so were the bar stools along the high serving counter, their occupants muttering quietly to each other or clutching their mugs in grim silence.

Most of the patrons looked like regular folk, but a small group of well-armed men loitered near the arched riverstone fireplace. A young Chantry sister lurked behind the door, trying to be inconspicuous - I wouldn't have noticed her at all, except I'm used to checking the shadows.

We all four stepped in and closed the door. The sound made one of the soldier-type men look up, and he nudged his companions, who stared.

"Hey!" The one with the flashiest armor called. "You're Gray Wardens, aren't you?" He took a few steps closer to get a good look at the crest on Alistair's breastplate, and I took an involuntary step back. The man's stance was aggressive and I looked around, trying to find a way to defuse the situation. Rocky curled his lip and growled. Great.

"Yeah, you totally are! You killed King Cailan, you bastards!" The aggressor's hand went to the hilt of his greatsword.

"That's a filthy lie!" Alistair shouted, clenching his fists. "Loghain betrayed the King and the Gray Wardens and left them both to die! We lost all our companions that day!"

"Like I'd believe a word you said! Come on, boys – there's a bounty on the Wardens!" The leader bounded forward and drew his massive sword, and chairs fell over as customers screamed and scrambled to get out of his way. The other three would-be bounty hunters also drew assorted weaponry: one held daggers like mine, one a two-handed battleaxe, and one a crossbow.

"No! Stop!" screamed the little redheaded Sister I'd completely forgotten about. To my astonishment, she drew a longsword and leaped forward.

"And now we get our hands dirty," Morrigan sighed, and almost negligently waved a hand that released a pulse of energy that flowed through me with no ill-effects except a tickle, but left all four of our foes with blank, stunned expressions. Morrigan used the momentary stillness to leap behind the counter, Alistair drew his sword and strapped on his shield, and the Sister and I scrambled over fallen furniture towards Crossbow Man. When his eyes cleared again, our blades were already falling.

We abandoned Crossbow Man to die, knowing he wouldn't be able to reload, and ran to help with the group's leader. Great sweeps of his massive sword were keeping Alistair at bay, and Rocky was hard-pressed keeping the others off his back. I paused for an interminable instant while I waited for the leader's next swing to reach its highest point, then pounced, plunging a dagger into the exposed leather strapping on his left side.

I wrenched it free, sure I'd punctured a lung, though I'd missed his heart - too low. The sudden pain distracted the man and his sword struck with only the force of its own weight instead of the powerful, shattering blow he'd intended. Alistair was able to catch the blade on his own and thrust it aside, finally inside the man's guard, and smashed his face with his shield.

I looked to Rocky. My dog was latched onto the throat of Battleaxe Man but the man's armor was keeping him alive. He'd dropped his two-handed axe (a useless weapon, in my opinion) and drawn his knife. I grabbed his wrist and wrenched him off-balance, bringing him crashing to the ground, where Rocky finally released his ineffective hold on the man's neck and settled for crushing his forearm.

I heard a scream of rage and turned to see, to my shock, that the leader wasn't dead yet. He'd struck out at Alistair's helmeted head with the pommel of his sword, surprising Alistair and knocking him back a step, ears ringing. Now the man prepared a real strike, and his stance was low and defensive - no easy openings this time. Horrified, I realized Dagger Man had worked his way behind Alistair, and I recognized that calculating look.

Events unfolded in lightning succession: The leader lunged and thrust; Dagger Man selected his target, Alistair's helmet askew from the pommel's impact and exposing a bare inch of neck, and struck; the Chantry sister threw her weight against the leader's shoulder, shifting the angle of the blow; and Dagger Man turned snowy white and shattered into icy fragments as Morrigan released her magic.

The thrusting strike of the bounty hunter leader hit off-center in Alistair's breastplate, sliding to the side with a screech instead of penetrating. Alistair tried to twist out of the way, but the tip of the sword slipped into the joint between pauldron and breastplate, slicing deeply across the top of his right shoulder, where it stuck. He grunted and swung his heavy shield in a wide arc, aiming its edge against the man's extended forearm. I heard a crack, and the man let go of his sword, cradling his arm and coughing blood.

"Enough!" he choked out. "You win! Please, mercy!" Blood streamed from his shattered nose and from the hole in his side.

I was torn. I had lied, cheated and stolen, but never cold-blooded murdered, and killing a crippled and unarmed man would definitely be murder. When you live right on the line that divides people from monsters, distinctions like that become very important.

But behind him Alistair sagged against the counter, one hand clutching at the sword still embedded in his armor and shoulder, the Chantry sister supporting the weight of the blade lest it wedge itself deeper.

"Alistair," I called to him. "Do you want I should kill him?"

"What? Are you serious?" He asked, bewildered. "I'm a little busy right now."

"Is that a no?"

"Maker's breath, Latitia, I don't give a rat's arse. Little help here?"

"Go," I told the shivering, beaten wreck in front of me. "But leave your purse!"

The man sobbed his thanks and he dropped a leather sack on the floor before fleeing out the door, cradling his broken arm.

I heard a happy bark and saw Rocky standing on top of a horribly savaged corpse, stumpy tail wagging and pride written large on his face.

"Good boy, Rocky. Now you wait there and guard," I ordered distractedly, finally able to pay attention to Alistair's sword problem. The great blade had wedged between two metal plates and was held in place by the pressure of the armor's leather underpinnings. I borrowed Alistair's smaller knife from where it hung on his belt and worked it under the twisted metal, carefully slicing through the leather underneath.

"Be careful, that's my body under there," Alistair said with a wince.

"I won't hurt you," I promised absently, focusing on cutting through the last bit without the suddenly-freed sword digging itself deeper into his shoulder.

"Support the weight like this, Sister, and pull just a little. It'll come free in a second," I said, and she obeyed, biting her lip. Sure enough, the last strap snapped suddenly under tension, but the Sister was ready and dragged the blade out without incident. Alistair let out the breath he'd been holding and let his head fall back against the counter, and blood poured anew from the open wound.

"Can I get this off without pulling it over your head?" I asked, frowning at the complicated mess of buckles and metal plates.

"Nope," he replied with a grimace.

"I'm just gonna cut this last strap, then, and pull the arm part off," I decided, and started sawing through the tough leather. When it parted and the metal shoulder plate and chainmail sleeve slid to the floor with a musical clatter of steel, I scooped a large glob of Alistair's healing salve out of its jar and pushed back the torn edges of his clothing, exposing the clean slice that had laid tendon and bone bare.

"Just spread it into the cut," he said through gritted teeth. "Don't worry about infection, stick your fingers right in there and then press it closed with the salve inside. It'll heal fastest that way."

Moving quickly, I spread the salve throughout the entire wound and then pressed it closed, gripping tightly.

"We're going to have to get you a new tunic," I said, making small talk to distract him. "I think you'd look good in green. Oh hey, did you hear the one about the Orliesan captain and the red shirt?"

"No..."

"So the captain of an Orlesian navy ship was sailing with his men when the lookout spied a pirate ship. The captain ordered his troops to prepare for battle, and then turned to his first mate and said, 'Mate, bring me my red shirt!' And he donned the bright red shirt and led them to victory."

"Okay, that's a good story," he said weakly.

"No it isn't, I'm not done. So they're still sailing along when they see an Antivan warship. And again the captain says, 'Mate, bring me my red shirt!' And he leads them to victory."

"Great."

"Still not done. After this the mate asks, 'Sir, why do you call for your red shirt before battle?' And the captain says, 'So that if I should be wounded, my men will not see the blood and be disheartened.' And the mate is impressed at his captain's forethought. So later on they're finally almost home when they enter a narrow straight and are suddenly ambushed by four Qunari battleships. The panicked first mate begs, 'Captain, what do we do?' And the captain says firmly, 'Mate, bring me my brown pants!'"

Alistair snorted and giggled, and I let go of his shoulder where the bleeding had already stopped.

"I hate to interrupt, but would you call off your dog?" The innkeeper said plaintively. "I would like to get these corpses out of my inn _if_ you don't mind."

I looked over and saw Rocky bristling at the pudgy man, standing protectively on top of the mutilated body of his vanquished opponent.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I asked him to guard. I should have been more specific. Rocky, leave that poor man alone," I ordered. He ducked his head in polite acknowledgment and slunk away from the corpse.

"I'm very sorry for fighting inside your establishment," I apologized to the innkeeper. "We were attacked unprovoked, as you saw."

Plainly, this was just another disruption in a litany so long, the poor man had run out of anger. Together, we lugged the corpses outside and I left him mopping gore off his hardwood floor.

Alistair was up and investigating behind the bar for food. "Innkeep, what's on the menu?" he called.

"Bread," was the curt reply.

"Just bread?" His eyes were pleading.

"Just bread. And you'll pay in advance. It's ten silver a loaf, and no complaining, neither. Most of the food was confiscated by the militia so you'll have to argue with them. I only have bread because my wife owns the town bakery."

I counted out forty silver and the man handed out four small round loaves of sourdough bread. The crusty bread was fragrant and still warm, topped with a sprinkling of seeds, and worth every penny. Rocky finished his loaf, licked the crumbs off the floor, then found a place where someone had spilled gravy and licked that for about ten minutes straight before I made him leave it. Alistair looked forlornly at the empty table and I remembered the extreme hunger that went with magically accelerated healing, so I bought him another loaf, which disappeared in moments.

While everyone was eating, I finally turned to the Chantry Sister who'd helped us in the fight.

"Thank you for your assistance, but who are you exactly?" I asked.

"My name is Leliana," she answered. "I'm here to help you. The Maker came to me in a dream and told me to help you in any way I can, to stop this Blight."

I raised an eyebrow. "He did, did he? Does he do this often?"

She blushed. "No, but it was real!" she declared. "I heard His voice in the silence of my heart! Please, let me come with you. I can make myself useful. A few of us Sisters have had a – a colorful past, and I can handle a bow and a dagger, and I can hide in shadows and pick locks."

"So can I," I said, absently combing blood out of my hair.

"I - I can help you in camp! I can cook over a campfire, and trap rabbits, and help keep watch, _and_ I can sing!" she begged, obviously grasping at straws.

"We need all the help we can get," Alistair said. "And with three of us keeping watch, we can each get more sleep." I noted that he didn't count Morrigan as a watcher, and that Morrigan didn't seem to mind being excluded from the requirement.

I leaned over and tugged on his arm, and we put our heads together. "Alistair, I'm not sure she's playing with a full deck," I muttered.

"Yes, but she seems more... 'Ooh, pretty colors!' than 'Muahaha! I am Princess Stabbity Stab, kill, kill!'" he whispered back.

I leaned back and sighed. "Fine," I said. "We leave in an hour. Go get your traveling stuff."

She ran off, and I hailed the innkeeper again, hoping to do some of our other shopping here. "Hello again," I greeted him. "We need two tents, blankets, bedrolls, steel cooking pots, plates, travel rations, and bandages. Oh, and a rain cloak. The militiamen said you might be able to help us?"

"I ain't got it," he grunted. "I'm all but sold out. In case you haven't noticed, the town's a mite crowded at the mo'."

We looked at each other in consternation. "You don't have _any_ of that?" I demanded.

"I have plain flour, salt, and some steel bucket lids you can use as plates," he suggested. "And I do got a spare cloak of my own that I could be convinced to sell, for the right price."

I counted out the coins from the ex-bounty-hunters pouch, wincing at the ridiculous price. Alistair and I fiddled around with our bags until we'd packed everything up in a way that was easy to carry and didn't get in the way of him reaching his sword. Then we went out front to wait for Leliana, glad to be out of the oppressively crowded inn. Alistair stretched and tested the mobility of his shoulder with only the occasional wince, and I marvelled at the speed with which it was healing. We sat on the edge of the inn's front porch and tried to ignore the hungry gaze of the refugees too poor to take advantage of the inn's bakery.

"I can't stand the thought of leaving all these people to die," Alistair said finally, and I nodded.

"Maybe we can talk to -"

"Can we really afford to waste time on this doomed town?" Morrigan interrupted me.

"That's heartless," Alistair accused, flushing, and I spoke up quickly to avoid an argument.

"Morrigan, I know what you mean, we've already lost almost a day taking care of the dog and the army's right behind us." She gave a 'humph' of satisfaction, but I went on to say, "But Lothering can't possibly defend itself and all these people will merely become food for the darkspawn. If we can convince them to take their livestock and flee, we can deprive the army of supplies."

"I suppose I see your point," Morrigan conceded, after a long and sulky pause. "Very well, let us continue solving other people's problems. Perhaps later we can rescue a kitten from a tree."

"Anyway," I ignored her jibe, "I was thinking we could talk to the innkeeper. He sees lots of people and he could get the word out. Maybe put a sign on his door. It won't take long."

"Sure," Alistair shrugged, and accompanied me inside. Morrigan stayed out in the sun, and I imagined she must find the crowds of patrons overwhelming after her life of isolation.

We cornered the innkeeper again, and quickly outlined the situation. At first he was happy to talk to us, since we'd spent so much money on him, but when we suggested he abandon his inn and flee, he balked.

"But this inn's been in my family for five generations," he protested, indicating the whole building with a broad gesture.

"If you flee, you can rebuild, and your family will continue," I told him, keeping my voice gentle to soften the impact of what I was about to add. "But if you stay, you, your wife, and any children you have will die, and that will be the end of your family's legacy." I was repeating the exact logic my people had used when making the painful decision to abandon the other Thaigs and hunker down in Orzammar: We had to keep our Houses, our families, alive, even if it meant the loss of the Deep Roads.

The man blanched and I saw his hands tremble; he picked up a glass and began polishing it to disguise his distress. I waited implacably for him to see reason, until he said, in a defeated tone, "I understand. I... I will tell the Mother of our Chantry, and tell my waitstaff to warn anyone who comes in. I'll stay until... Until the last minute. I have to. But I'll send my wife and my children north tonight. We have relatives in Highever."

I reached up to grip his shoulder in a gesture of solidarity, which he returned with a wan smile. Behind us, I heard Leliana return, and we turned to leave.

"Ready to go?" Alistair asked her, and she nodded.

"Hang on, you're still missing that whole arm part of your armor," I said to Alistair. "That won't do. Here, sit." I pushed him into a chair and picked up the piece of chainmail and steel, sliding it back onto his arm.

"Leliana, let me borrow your bootlace, please," I requested, waiting to see if she would do it. She pulled out her left bootlace and handed it over unquestioningly. Maybe she would be okay after all. I wove the lacing through the chainmail links, 'sewing' the sleeve back into the main body of his armor. When I was done, I tugged at it experimentally.

"I wouldn't want you to wear that indefinitely, but it'll do for now," I decided.

"There's a very good weaponsmith in Redcliffe," Alistair said. "We can have it properly repaired there."

"How far is it to Redcliffe?" I asked as we turned to leave the inn again.

"Well, if we leave tonight, we should arrive late the fourth day – three nights on the road. I really don't think we should stay here tonight. I can feel the army moving this way, and we don't want to be here when it arrives."

With that happy thought, we gathered our meager possessions and struck out into the lengthening shadows, trying not to meet the accusing eyes of the refugees we left behind.


	10. Calenhad Double Cream Special

Redcliffe lay on the shores of Lake Calimshan, beyond a narrow strip of grassy plains and over a range of hills sparsely dotted with farming villages. We walked in grim silence; the thought of the dreadful casualties in store for the little town lay heavy on our hearts. We passed several small groups of plodding refugees who also headed north, but their progress was generally hampered by the presence of children, the elderly, or goats.

We passed through more wheat fields, populated largely by surly crows and even surlier farmers, before the path began slowly trending uphill in the growing dusk. We kept to ourselves and continued walking through a distractingly glorious sunset, finally stopping when I noticed Leliana stumbling over rocks in the road.

Rocky and I both had good night vision, so we collected wood while Alistair dug a deep firepit. We needed the fire for warmth in the descending chill, but there was no need to advertise our presence to passersby any more than necessary. Morrigan erected a very minimalistic lean-to some distance from our campfire.

As we sat around the fire and chewed on more of the Lothering tavern's bread, I noticed Alistair add a heavy log to the fire using his injured shoulder without wincing at all. I leaned over, grabbed his arm and wiggled my fingers into the rent in the chainmail to investigate the shoulder beneath, ignoring his protests. "It's all better," I said with some surprise, releasing him.

"Told you," he said grumpily, adjusting his armor.

"You'll have to tell me where you got that stuff." I gestured at the sealed crock of ointment on his belt. "We're probably going to burn through it pretty fast."

Unexpectedly, Morrigan answered me, her voice coming from behind me as she approached the fire to grab a burning stick for her own use. "I can make more as needed." She pointed towards a broad-leafed weed growing at the edge of the road. "I need only elfroot."

"Wow," I said in amazed delight, "you are a useful person to have around, Morrigan."

Rocky trotted over and sniffed the plant. "Oh, yes," Morrigan admitted reluctantly, "Mabari have a fondness for the herb as well."

"Good boy, Rocky!" I enthused. "Dig that plant up! Dig! Yes! Now bring it - bring it here, boy, don't eat it. Good boy!"

My dog deposited the slightly slobbery plant in my hands and sat down, expectantly. I pulled a small piece off and held it out, narrowly avoiding losing a finger as he enveloped my entire hand in his huge mouth to slurp up the root.

Alistair requested the first watch and overruled my objection that he was too tired after his sleepless night by threatening to stay up anyway, and I unilaterally assigned the unpopular middle shift to Leliana. So the night began with Leliana rolled in her blanket and me curled in a tight ball under my new cloak, trying not to think about the vast emptiness of the plains and huddled within arm's reach of Alistair, who sat cross-legged and stoic under his own cloak. Within minutes I heard Liliana's breathing settle into sleep.

Sleep did not come as easily to me, though. Between the scrape on my right arm from the Hurlock's bracer, and a bruise on my thigh I must have picked up during the tavern brawl, I couldn't get comfortable. If I lay on my back, I got cold, but if I curled up, I was guaranteed to be lying on one sore spot or the other. Eventually deciding my leg was less sore, I lay on that side and tried to ignore it.

Then I got cold anyway. I missed sharing a bed with Rica, and thought longingly of the geothermic baths and the heat that rolled off the lava at home. I sighed.

"Are you all right? Can't you sleep?" Alistair whispered.

"I'm cold and sore," I admitted. "And I would kill for a hot bath. Literally, just tell me whose throat needs cutting, I'll do it right now."

"There's a bath in the castle at Redcliffe. It's communal, but it's usually pretty warm."

"The baths in Orzammar are communal, too. At least, the one in Dust Town is. The wealthier castes have running hot water in their homes and everyone has their own bathroom. The plumbing is newer and nobody installed it in Dust Town, that's why we still use the old calidarium. Right now that sounds like the definition of civilization." I shivered. Staying warm tonight was becoming a losing battle. My sore leg stabbed with pain as I shifted and accidentally pressed it against a rock. I swore under my breath.

"Most of Ferelden's baths consist of a big bucket full of lukewarm water heated over the fire," Alistair was saying. "The bath at Redcliffe is one of the things I missed most when I left."

"Why did you leave?" I asked, looking for distraction.

"I was sent away, actually. The Arl had taken me in when my mother died birthing me and nobody knew who my father was. But the Arl's wife never would believe him that I wasn't actually _his_ son, and she was so jealous and angry. Naturally, he chose his wife over someone else's bastard son, and I found myself packed off to the Chantry whether I liked it or not." Alistair sounded casual, but I heard a vibration of old anger and hurt in his voice.

"Icy bitch." I thought for a moment and added, "Gold-digging whore."

Alistair snorted with suppressed laughter. "Maker, you've got a sharp tongue! Do you talk about everyone that way behind their backs?"

"No, only people who hurt my friends." Had I crossed a line?

"Oh." To my surprise, his voice had gone soft. I rolled on my back to look at his face, and he smiled shyly at me. I smiled back. Then I saw an excellent opportunity.

"Can I lie on your lap? I'm freezing and my arm hurts too much to lie on it, but if I roll over then my leg hurts instead," I begged, giving him the big, soulful eyes.

"Oh! Um, sure." He sound embarrassed and was probably blushing, but a yes is a yes. I scooted over and draped myself over his legs so my head and body were supported without pressure on my arm. I wriggled around a little and shivered again, body still playing catch-up in the ongoing battle for warmth. Alistair sat stock-still, apparently frozen in terror.

_By the Ancestors, what do they do to boys in the Chantry that a girl is so scary?_ I wondered. After a while I shivered again, and curled more tightly around his knee, clutching my cloak to my body. Alistair tensed and started to say something, then stopped, then steeled himself and tried again.

"Um, here, sit up for a second," he blurted. I propped myself up and he tugged the flap of his own cloak out from between us. "Okay, you can lie down," he said. I did, and he wrapped the edge of his cloak around me, trying to spread it out and cover as much as possible.

"Conserves warmth, remember?" he whispered.

"Thank you," I murmured, and drifted off.

I was dreaming one of my usual nonsensical dreams, something to do with losing something important but not knowing what it was, when a roar blasted through my unconsciousness and shattered the dream like glass. Before me stood an enormous dragon, a beast of legend, covered in black scales with orange light blazing between them as if the beast's skin barely contained a unquenchable fire. It spread its vast wings, and I saw it clutched the shattered corpse of Duncan in one claw and King Cailen in the other.

_I killed your best_, it shrieked silently. _Your pathetic efforts are useless. Flee, and you might live a little __longer. Fight, and I will pick my teeth with your bones!_

And with that, the titanic horror launched itself at me and engulfed me in its terrible mouth. I felt my skin blister in its fiery breath, felt its jagged teeth pierce my flesh, and screamed.

I woke suddenly, paralyzed in terror and aware of something heavy trapping me. The feeling reminded me of the crushing weight of those unstoppable jaws, and I cried out and jerked myself free, trying to stand and tangling myself in my cloak, staggering and falling hard on one elbow. The sharp pain cut through some of the panic and I stopped thrashing and lay still, listening to my own pounding heart and ragged breathing.

"Whoa, whoa, it's all right, you're safe," Alistair was saying. I felt one hand grip my shoulder and roll me onto my back. I blinked at him muzzily and felt his cool hand push my hair out of my face. Gradually the last traces of the nightmare released me and I looked around, realizing I had almost fallen in the firepit while freaking out.

"I'm sorry I scared you," he apologized. "I guess I fell asleep and ended up leaning on you. You were right, I was too tired for first watch." He helped me sit up and I scrubbed at my face with my palms, trying to wake up. Rocky whined and licked my ear.

Liliana was hovering a few feet away. "Fortunately, I woke up a while ago and took my watch anyway," she told us proudly.

"Thanks," I said, ashamed of my panic and wishing she would go away. "You can sleep now. I won't be sleeping any more tonight." She beamed at me and rolled herself back up in her blanket. I took some deep breaths and a long drink of water, which helped a lot.

"You had a nightmare, I assume?" Alistair asked, then, grimaced. "Maker's breath, my leg fell asleep and now it's all tingly!"

"Poor man," I patted his knee, feeling giddy with the aftereffects of adrenaline. "It's true, women are nothing but pain and trouble."

"And also very expensive," he added, massaging some life back into his leg, "what with the fancy shoes and the dinners out. The flower costs alone can bankrupt a man."

"You left out jewelry," I said. "A woman's not happy unless she can't stand up straight with the weight of the jewels around her neck."

"You're right, women aren't worth it. Good thing it's just us guys," he teased, dodging my retaliatory swat.

"Seriously, though," he said, returning to the subject, "the nightmares are normal. It's a symptom of the darkspawn taint that makes us Gray Wardens. It's worst right after the Joining, but then it fades."

"Well, that's great," I grumbled. "Next time I'll bring something to eat and settle down to watch the show. The Archdemon was trying so hard, I'd feel bad if I didn't give him my undivided attention."

"You saw the Archdemon?" He said, surprised.

"Is that unusual?"

"Usually only the oldest Wardens can sense the Archdemon. Duncan said he could sense it and that's how he knew this was really a blight. Nobody believed him, though."

"I wouldn't say that I sense him. I don't feel him now. Or is it 'her'? 'It'? Anyway, it wasn't like a normal dream; more like a vision, really. I imagine it's to do with me being a dwarf, again."

"How do you figure?"

"Dwarves don't go to the Fade when we sleep," I explained. "We have dreams, but they're our own thoughts, not the Fade and its demons and spirits. If the Archdemon wants to mess with me, he has to be pretty direct - no sneaking around in the Fade, playing tricks."

His eyes widened. "I didn't know that," he admitted. "No offense, but that sounds really weird."

"It's just not what you're used to. To me, leaving my body every night to inhabit a shared realm full of dangerous spirits sounds weird," I pointed out.

"That's a very good point." He yawned.

"Go to sleep," I ordered. "I'm fine now. Rocky'll keep me company, won't you, Rocky?" He looked up and waved his stump tail sleepily. "Oh, fine, you can sleep too," I said in resignation.

Alistair stretched out on the ground and fell asleep almost immediately. I was glad he could sleep so easily; I'd been worried, when he insisted on first watch, that something was seriously wrong with him, but apparently he had just needed time.

I stared at the fire, occasionally poking it or adding a stick, and the hours ticked along. When the eastern sky began to lighten, I started thinking about breakfast. The only thing the town had been able to spare had been flour and salt - literally, just a bag of flour and a pouch of salt. I wasn't exactly a culinary artist, but I was pretty familiar with the limited ingredient scenario.

After some internal discussion, I got up and retrieved a bowl and the flour. I poured flour out, measured the salt with my hands, then added water. I kneaded the resulting dough for a while, then let it sit while I set up our lone cooking pot with water to boil. Then I took my knife out and began cutting strips off the ball of dough. I rolled the strips into little snakes and piled them on a plate.

The process was time-consuming, but it's not like I had anything better to do. When the water was boiling merrily, Rocky was drooling and begging, and I had completed my heap of little dough snakes, I heard Alistair sigh and stretch. I looked over at him and smiled. "Welcome back. How was the Fade?"

He sat up and his eyes went immediately to the snake pile. "Dull. What's all that?"

"Spatzle - hand-rolled noodles. It's the best thing I could make with just flour and salt. They would be better with butter and eggs," I added wistfully.

"You could say that about anything," he said. "Even darkspawn would be better if they were covered in eggs. Funnier, at least."

I grinned and dumped the noodles into the water. "They're ready when they float."

Leliana heard us and sat up, yawning. "Good morning," she said sleepily. "I heard something about noodles." I smiled briefly at her. There was just something about her that rubbed me the wrong way. I filed that away to think about later, because I couldn't imagine why - she seemed perfectly nice.

"Shouldn't someone wake Morrigan?" Leliana asked.

"No way, I'm not going to risk losing a hand," Alistair stated, shaking his head.

At Leliana's questioning look, I explained, "Morrigan's a shapeshifter, and sometimes she sleeps as a wolf. I assume because the fur is warm."

"Also, I can ... acquire my own breakfast," came Morrigan's light voice. I looked up to see her predatory grin.

"Andraste's grace, do you eat your prey raw?" Leliana cried in apparent horror.

"Never mind that, why didn't you share?" I asked indignantly. "All we've got is spatzle!"

She shrugged. "You want rabbit, hunt your own. You know how to set a trap, do you not?"

I just served the noodles.

That day's walking took us into a range of softly rolling hills, covered in verdant green grass. Massive brown animals grazed lazily, occasionally looking up at us with vague interest. Their liquid eyes were completely docile and totally stupid.

After passing several herds of these animals, I nudged Alistair and asked about them.

"They're cows," he answered. "They give both meat and milk. They're delicious." He raised his voice and shouted in the direction of the closest cow. "You're delicious! That's right, keep eating that grass! Get good and fat!" The animal twitched its ears, and we laughed.

Eventually the road took us past a large and prosperous-looking farmstead. Its huge barns stood back from the road, behind a plain but very clean half-timbered house. An elderly woman sat on the broad front porch, cradling a sleeping infant. A white painted sign stood near the road that read:

_Cory's Creamery_

_Ninth Generation Family Farm_

_We Have Calenhad Double Cream Special!_

I pointed this out. "Do you think they'd sell us some meat?"

"Never mind that, they have cheese!" Alistair said excitedly, and we turned off the road to follow the winding drive towards the house. The gray-haired woman noticed our approach and sat up with with a cry of alarm, but I held up my empty hands even as I noted the crossbow bolt poking out through an upstairs window - this farmstead was ready for trouble.

"We just want to trade!" I called. "We have money! We'll pay!" I took out the last of the bounty hunter's money and jingled it suggestively.

"Wait right there, please," the woman called back, scuttling inside with the infant. I heard a door bang behind the house and her screeching call for someone named Matteus. The baby woke and started to wail. I glanced at Alistair and he shrugged. We waited.

After several minutes a tall, burly man came around the side of the house. His knee-high boots were caked with filth and he was wiping his hands on a rag.

"Can I help you, good sir?" the farmer asked, addressing Alistair, who glanced at me; I made a 'go on' gesture.

"Uh, we wondered if you had any food to trade," he said.

Matteus looked us over, taking in our equipment and Leliana's Chantry robes. "Come on around back to the storehouse," he said, evidently deciding we weren't robbers, leading us to a long, low-roofed structure with a smoker at one end. Inside, I saw sides of bacon curing in salt, as well as dried meats and a vast array of round objects of various sizes and colors. Alistair's mouth hung open and he walked along the shelves full of round things with the most lustful look I've ever seen in a man's eyes.

"What are those?" I asked him.

"Cheese, of course!"

"Which is...?"

He stared. "You're kidding. You've never had cheese."

I folded my arms and scowled at him. "I bet you've never had nug."

"Point taken," he laughed. "Well, cheese isn't all that important - just the most awesome food _in the world_. Good sir, have you any wheels open that my friend could try?"

The proud farmer turned to a chest standing against the back wall and rummaged around for a while, before producing several slices of the mysterious 'cheese.' I raised an eyebrow at Alistair before picking up an innocent-looking white slice with tiny holes in it.

"Actually, don't start with that one," Alistair stopped me. "Try this one." He held out a smooth, ivory-colored slice and I popped it into my mouth and chewed. It was creamy, rich, mouth-filling and satisfying. I swallowed and picked up the first slice again, curious now. This one was sharp and piquant and I grimaced.

"OK, you were right. That's obviously an acquired taste," I admitted. We shared the rest of the samples with much delight, eventually settling on a firm, golden cheese that came from a huge wheel almost as big as my torso.

"We want this one," Alistair told the dairyman, pointing.

"That's a big cheese," the man warned. "It's two sovereigns."

I grabbed Alistair's elbow for a whispered consultation. "That's literally all the money we have," I said. "Actually I think we might be a few coppers short. Can we really afford to be totally broke?"

"I know, but that's a good price for a cheese like that," he whispered back. "And it will keep for ages, and it's very nourishing. And delicious. Can we buy it, _please_?"

I started digging through my pockets and looking for coppers, adding in my head. Alistair produced several coins from inside his boot, ignoring my surprised look. Then Leliana offered a small pouch of silver.

"I don't want you to have to pay for my food," she said shyly. "This is all I have, but you're welcome to it."

We poured the coins into the happy dairyman's hands, and I hefted the enormous cheese.

"By the tits of my ancestors, _this_ is a _big_ cheese," I grunted.

Alistair took it from me and tucked it under one arm. I glowered. He caught my eye and grinned. "Not my fault I'm bigger and stronger, half-pint."

We walked over hill and dale for the rest of the day and passed more depressed refugees, before the road made a wide bend to the east to go around a hill too steep for wagons, and traveled along an ancient, dry riverbed for a while. I craned my neck to look behind and around us, nervous about falling rock - the craggy ravine walls hadn't been reinforced at all, and the mason in me itched to start building buttresses - when a quick movement behind a boulder caught my eye.

I gripped Alistair's elbow and pointed, but it was gone and he thought I'd seen a rabbit or a bird; I scowled and trudged along behind him, hands hovering near my daggers because I did _not_ think a bird would have glinted like metal in the sun, and when we followed a hairpin turn and came face-to-face with the business end of a half-dozen short swords, I muttered, "Told you so."


	11. Carrion Eaters

"Drop your bags and turn around," the leader, the only one wearing real armor, called to us.

I gestured for Alistair and the others to drop their bags - not to obey, but to buy time and free up our sword arms. While equipment clattered around me, I called back, "Did you know when you planned this ambush that we have a Mabari, a battle mage and two Gray Wardens in our party? You have only six men; those aren't good odds."

A few of the scruffier-looking men looked to their leader for confidence, but the others stood immobile, gripping their weapons tightly as the leader responded.

"We're desperate men," he bluffed, gesturing with his sword. "Loghain's army requisitioned all our supplies and then tried to conscript us. Well, we're nobody's slaves - we're gonna take back what we deserve!"

Deserters, then. I had opened my mouth to say something placating, when I looked over his shoulder and saw the bloody smears on the road ahead and the mounds of stolen goods, caged chickens, and dead mules. I changed my mind.

"Looks like you've already taken plenty, but if you want, we'll be happy to give you what you deserve." Rocky and Alistair's body language shifted subtly as they waited for a signal. The robbers shuffled closer together, wary-eyed.

We all stared at each other for a long moment before Morrigan gave an exasperated sigh. "Are we to stand about all day? Let us be done with this!"

She flicked a hand in the direction of the robber leader and lacy frost instantly formed over his skin; he stiffened and toppled slowly backwards, shattering on the hard ground. The others gave a cry of chagrin and clustered in a knot around his broken body, tangling themselves up as they tried to keep all their swords pointed at us.

"Not so tough now, eh?" I scoffed, drawing my daggers. "Are we the first armed party you've tried? Has it been all helpless refugees up till now? You're pathetic."

Alistair and Leliana had their swords out, too, and Rocky threw his head back and bayed his hunting song, and that was just too much for them. They broke and ran, dropping their weapons. Rocky coursed after them and caught up to the slowest in three great bounds, tackling him to the ground and savagely ripping at his throat; the four survivors disappeared over the hill.

"Carrion-eaters." I sheathed my daggers and spat in the dust at the side of the road, disgusted. Alistair mimicked the gresture and thrust his sword into its scabbard with an abruptness of movement that I was learning meant anger. Leliana circled the loot pile looking for survivors.

"_Maker have mercy_." Her choked cry came from behind the pile of loot and I followed her with Alistair, coming upon the body of a middle-aged woman, lying naked on the ground in a pool of her own blood. The victim's hands had been bound behind her back, and her long hair, streaked with gray, fell loosely across a face that still bore a luminous beauty, even under the bruises. Alistair pressed a hand over his mouth, eyes wide, then turned and staggered across the road, gagging.

I stared at the loot pile, torn between a desire to put distance between myself and this powerful example of the depths to which men could sink, and the reality of our need for money and supplies. Eventually I settled for rifling the pockets of the two dead men, collecting a few cheap gems and coins, and picked up a woolen blanket that looked relatively clean and didn't have blood on it. Leliana helped me release the caged chickens, who strutted about, pecking and scratching at the side of the road in blissful stupidity. I picked up the eggs they'd left behind and used Alistair's helmet as a basket to carry them.

"'Tis a dreadful waste, as some fox will surely eat them," Morrigan said. "We should kill them and eat them ourselves instead."

Alistair, still a bit green, shook his head. "They're bantams, they can fly if they have to. They'll find their way to a barn eventually." Privately, I suspected he just didn't have the stomach for slaughter right now, but I didn't care; we never ate chicken in Orzammar, the eggs were too valuable, and when an old biddy finally died it usually went to feed some noble's dog.

"What are we going to do with the bodies?" Leliana asked in a small voice.

I sighed. "I don't know. We don't have time to bury them."

"_Bury_ them?" she repeated, shocked. "Why would we do such a thing!"

"Oh, I know this. Dwarves entomb their dead so their spirits can strengthen the Thaig," Alistair said, pleased at being the knowledgeable one.

"We cremate ours," Leliana told me, trying to regain her composure. "It is much more dignified."

"You c_remate _them? _All_ of them?" Now I was shocked. "Being denied the right to lie in the Stone's embrace is the last and worst insult inflicted upon the casteless. It means your soul is not worth keeping."

"But the pyre sets the soul free," Leliana insisted.

"Free and _lost_." I glared at her for an instant before Alistair brushed past me, bumping my shoulder on purpose as he picked up a blanket and gently draped it over the sad remains at our feet, and I got his point – this was not the place for fighting over comparative burial traditions.

Leliana clasped her hands and made herself small, looking miserable, so I guessed she felt bad about it, too. She leaned over the shrouded body and held out her hands in blessing, and when she began reciting something about Andraste in a sing-song voice, Alistair joined in with what I eventually realized was the Chant of Light.

When they concluded their prayer (its solemnity only occasionally marred by chicken squawking), we trudged on in glum silence for some minutes before Leliana dropped back to walk beside me.

"I'm sorry, I was being ignorant," she said quietly.

"Eh, me too. It's a bit of a sore point, actually." She looked confused, and I realized she probably didn't know what my brand meant. If that was so, then I saw no need to enlighten her. "But it's nice of you to apologize."

"It's nothing." She fell silent for several more steps before blurting out, "I fear we don't understand each other. Perhaps, if I knew more about you, I might avoid offending you further."

"I'm a dwarf. I lived in a hole, under permanent siege from the darkspawn that humans ignore as long as they stay underground and only kill dwarves. I disgraced a tournament by fighting in it without permission, but a senior Gray Warden named Duncan was impressed with me and rescued me from exile. Now I'm here, with you and Alistair and Morrigan, saving the world."

"That's succinct," she said, laughing a bit nervously. "Well, I lived in the court in Orlais before I was – I was also exiled. I fled to Ferelden and joined the Chantry, and there I found peace and the Maker spoke to me in my heart."

"I thought that the Maker didn't speak directly to anyone."

"That's what the Chantry teaches. They say He left us because we were so determined to err and hurt ourselves, and He could not bear to watch. But I have felt His love in the beauty of this world, in the song of the wind and the warmth of the sun, and I know Him to still be with us."

I glanced up at her and saw her eyes shimmer with tears for a moment before she blinked them away. "I like your version better," I told her.

I gave her a moment to compose herself before I couldn't resist teasing her a little. "Wait, you were in court? You weren't a lawyer, were you? I can't have a lawyer in my party, I have _some_ standards, you know."

She laughed a silvery little laugh. "No, I was a bard. I sang and played the lute." Her eyes saddened again for a moment. "I had to leave my lute behind." Then she giggled. "And all of my shoes. Oh, my poor, beautiful shoes! I wear only plain brown as a Sister and oh, how I miss them."

We camped that night in an abandoned barn, warm enough despite the holes in the roof. The next day the hills grew progressively taller and rockier, and we hunkered down for the night in a deep crack in the stone, out of the wind that whipped over the top of the ridge, complaining vigorously about the drizzle that fell in the night and the ache in our knees and calves from walking uphill.

The following morning we passed over the highest ridge and finally started going down again. Rust-red streaks of iron ore now stained the sides of the hills, and according to Alistair's reckoning, we should arrive at Redcliffe tonight; I felt cheerful at the prospect of a real dinner and a warm bed, but Alistair had grown quiet again, which by now I knew was a bad sign.

Around five in the afternoon, he stopped suddenly and announced that we should make camp on the road.

"What? Why?" I asked, nonplussed. "I thought you said we could make it there by dark!"

"Yes, well, the hills are hard to judge," he mumbled, avoiding my eyes. "I just think it would be better if we stayed here another night."

I stared at him for a few seconds. The prospect of another cold night without the promised bath filled me with such disappointment I actually felt tears prick at my eyes. But at the same time, Alistair was shuffling his feet and generally acting ... ashamed?

"Is it really worth the danger of sleeping outside?" I asked. Whatever 'it' was, whatever was bothering him, it had better be good.

He gave me a stricken look. _Ah, sod it all, I asked him a question he can't say 'yes' to_, I realized.

"Fine, all right, we can sleep here. No use twisting an ankle in the dark, eh?" I forced myself to smile.

We made camp and he stayed quiet all evening. I slept curled up on Rocky and, despite his occasional fidgeting, he was quite warm. In the morning, I found I had to prod Alistair repeatedly to make him get going.

"Would you fill in the firepit, please, while I pack?" I asked.

"Do this, do that," he snapped.

I was shocked and angry and hurt. I wanted to yell at him. _You are the senior warden and yet you constantly look to me for leadership! How dare you punish me for stepping up for you, coward!_

What I actually said, my voice small and hurt, was, "Alistair, what was that for?"

He dropped the shovel and sat on the ground with a groan, putting his face in his hands.

"I'm so sorry," he said, his voice muffled. "You've been nothing but kind and understanding and I'm acting like a child. I just - there's something I have to tell you that I've been dreading."

I sat down next to him and waited.

"Remember how I said I was an orphan and the Arl didn't know my father? Well, that's not strictly true. My... father was King Maric. I'm telling you now because I realized it might come up while we're at Redcliffe, and I didn't want it to be a surprise to you."

I waited for him to say the awful thing he'd been dreading. After a while he risked a glance at my face and saw I was still sitting there expectantly.

"Aren't you going to say anything, or - or be angry or something?" he asked.

"Wait, is that it?" I demanded. "You've been beating yourself over the head with _that_ all night? What business is it of mine who your father is? So you didn't want me to know, big deal. Thank you for telling me now, though, and sparing me the embarrassment of learning it from a stranger."

"Uh, you're welcome," he said, still looking like he didn't quite believe me. "You do realize what I just said, right? Last son of the king? Royal bastard? Lied to you?"

"Yep. Why is this bastard thing such a big deal? In Orzammar, you would be a totally legitimate heir. I assume from your upbringing that things are different up here, though."

He laughed a little bitterly. "Here, a bastard is nothing but an embarrassment. I kept it hidden from everyone, my whole life. There was some danger in letting it be known, and of course it would disgrace the King." He thought for a moment. "And, well, I guess I didn't tell you before because I want you to like me for _me_."

"I do like you for you," I told him firmly. "And I promise I'm not mad, although if you keep beating yourself up over nothing, I might change my mind."

He smiled a real smile this time, and I stood and offered him a hand up. "If we're having a truth party right now, I might as well warn you, I'm not 100% honest 100% of the time, either, you know," I warned.

He grinned crookedly. "I had begun to suspect a bit of occasional play-acting."

"Tell you what," I offered, "Here's a truth for you to hold over my head: My mother was a whore, and I don't know who my father is. My sister's a whore, too. I'm the first woman in my family in generations to make a living using her brain instead of her cu- sorry, _lady bits_."

His mouth hung open for a second and I watched him try to figure out how to respond. I took pity on him in the end and gestured toward the road. "Shall we?"

"Right, let's go," he said, relieved.

"Lead on, my prince," I smirked.

"Ye gods, I'm going to regret this, aren't I?" he groaned.

"You could always retaliate," I suggested, shouldering my pack, "But that might require you to use naughty words, and I heard the Maker would strike you down if you even _thought_ about lady bits."

He giggled and blushed at himself for doing so. We met up with Morrigan and Leliana, who waited by the road looking innocent but were almost certainly eavesdropping.

After I'd had some time to think as we walked, though, I noticed he still didn't look happy and started to second-guess our conversation. Something else must be bothering him. I sighed, sidled closer to him and bumped his elbow.

"Are you nervous about going home?" I asked quietly.

He jumped guiltily. "Why would I be nervous? Did I leave the oven on?"

"Oh, maybe because we have to go ask for help from that frigid bitch and the man who chose her over you. Just a thought."

And so he told me, knuckles clenched white with remembered rage and grief, of how he'd broken first his mother's amulet and later his bond with Eamon, and the whole while all I could think was _Damn, damn, damn.__ What in sod-all do I say now? _

"That was a cruel thing to do to a child," I said carefully. "You lost your home and your family all at once. Of course you were angry. It's not stupid to feel that way, especially when you're young."

He said nothing, but I could tell he was listening, so I went on. "You're not that child anymore. You're a grown man, a Gray Warden. When you see Eamon again, you can start a new relationship, man-to-man. And this time, you have backup." I took his hand and gripped it tightly to emphasize my point.

He looked at my hand, so small it was barely visible inside his own, then looked at me like he'd never seen me before. I smiled a little uncertainly. His reaction to being touched had been very ambivalent before and I had ruthlessly bullied him into letting me do it anyway - not a good basis for trust. Then, very slowly, a genuine smile lit his face until he was positively beaming.

Now I had a new worry. I'd known this man for how long? Better not let him get the wrong idea. I extracted myself gently but firmly with the pretense of getting a drink of water.

After a few hours the road crested a final ridge before turning sharply downhill. Before us lay glittering Lake Calenhad. I stood and watched the sparkling water long enough that everyone stopped and looked back at me with raised eyebrows. Another few twists and turns and Redcliffe Town came into view, a village which appeared to have grown organically around the fishing docks.

We crossed a little bridge over a roaring stream that leaped, foaming, from pool to pool as it tumbled downhill. I stopped again and hung over the railing to look at the water.

"Are there fish in here?" I asked. Then, on impulse, I rolled over and hung upside-down from the rail by my knees so I could just touch the water. It was like ice and chilled my fingers to the bone almost immediately.

"What in Andraste's name are you doing!" I heard Alistair and Leliana yell in almost perfect unison.

"Making a fool of herself," was Morrigan's typically dry reply.

"Going fishing!" I cried and waved my hands through the flashing water. I felt two pairs of hands grip my ankles. I sighed and allowed them to pull me back up on the bridge, submitting to their scolding with bowed head and scarcely concealed amusement.


	12. Knight of the Living Dead

But when we followed another hairpin turn in the path to cross a second little bridge, we encountered a nervous young bowman who fell all over himself begging us for help.

"There's some kind of - _evil_ attacking the town," he explained, wild-eyed. "Monsters attack every night, all night until dawn. Everyone's been fighting... and dying. We've no King to send aid, and no Arl to guide us!"

"Hold on, no Arl?" Alistair interrupted. "What's happened to Eamon?"

"We don't know!" The young man clenched his fists in frustration. "Nobody can get in or out of the castle. They could all be dead, for all we know! But even before that, the Arl fell ill, something not even Mother Hannah of our Chantry could cure. Many of our Knights have gone questing for the holy relic Andraste's Ashes to cure him, but of course none of them have found, or even know for sure it exists."

"And meanwhile, the town is left without its knights," I muttered. Beside me, Alistair fingered his sword hilt anxiously; when I looked up him I saw he had turned deathly pale.

"Please let me take you to Bann Teagan," the bowman begged. "He's the man running things now. He can explain everything better than I can."

Alistair cast me a pleading look, and I nodded. The relieved guard, little more than a boy and obviously conscripted out of desperation, led us the rest of the way into the lake valley and through the town square, where dispirited militia worked on shoring up their barricades. Blood and worse stained the paving stones, and I wondered how I had missed smelling the smoke from the pyre until now.

The lad gestured for us to follow him into the Chanty, a building almost identical to its Lothering counterpart, with thick stone walls and high, narrow stained-glass windows. It had become the center of defense now, the barricades centered around its great iron-clad doors, and terrified noncombatants crammed its halls. Children, elderly, and all the women who couldn't or wouldn't fight had set up camp inside, along with the wounded laid on tiny cots and ministered to by a gray-haired Chantry Mother with a commanding presence. I guessed she must be the Mother Hannah; she certainly seemed in charge of healing.

At the end of the hall stood an impeccably-dressed nobleman who nonetheless carried a greatsword and looked like he knew how to use it. Our guide tapped respectfully on his elbow and he turned with a kind smile for the nervous young man, who pointed us out and then scurried away.

"My name is Teagan, brother to the Arl," he introduced himself formally. I wondered if Bann was a title, then realized he was speaking to Alistair and not me.

"I remember you," Alistair told him, a little hesitant, and I hoped he wasn't too disappointed at having to jog the man's memory. "The last time you saw me, I was a lot younger. And... covered in mud."

"Covered in mud...? Oh! Alistair! You're alive - that is wonderful news!" The Bann seemed genuinely pleased, and offered Alistair a manly one-armed hug.

"Believe me, no one is more surprised than I am," Alistair laughed. "But what's going on here?"

Teagan grew serious. "No one has been in or out of the castle in days. No guards patrol the walls, and no one has responded to my calls. Every night, evil ..._things_ come from the castle, worse every night. We drive them back, but many perish every time. We fear that tonight will be the worst yet, and our men grow tired and too few. Please, can you help us?"

Alistair looked to me, and I nodded firmly. "Absolutely. We need Redcliffe and the Arl; we're gathering forces to stop the Blight. That's why we're here."

Teagan rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Loghain claimed all the Wardens had died, and that he pulled his men out to save them. That the Wardens murdered the King, and the King would have killed everyone in pursuit of glory. I do not believe him. It is an act of a desperate man. If you can free us, I'm sure Arl Eamon will stand with you - if he survives, that is. If he dies - Maker forbid it - I will manage affairs until his son, Connor, is old enough, and I will certainly help you."

I smiled at him and clasped his hand, promising to be back after consulting with his militia leaders and the knight, Ser Perth, who guarded the pass to the castle. He kissed the back of my hand with courtly grace, making me blush as I scurried away.

Outside, we found Murdock, the mayor and head of the new militia, 'training' some bowmen. I say 'training' because he was about as charismatic as a damp gray rag, and his men shot listlessly at the targets while he harangued them with such helpful comments as "Try to hit the target" and "Not like that - do it right!" I looked at Alistair and he grimaced, so I turned to Leliana.

"You said you can use a bow," I reminded her. She nodded. "Give these men a lesson and a little encouragement, would you?"

"Certainly, thank you!" Leliana exclaimed, and practically exploded with delight at being given a task. _Good grief_, I thought, _it's like I'm leading a pack of excited dogs_. I tugged Murdock gently away to discuss the situation out of earshot when he began to scowl at Leliana's usurping of the archery lesson.

"What exactly are we dealing with, here?" I asked the craggy-faced man.

He heaved a deep sigh and rolled his eyes heavenward. "Proof that the Maker is angry with us," he grumbled.

I controlled my irritation with an effort, and persisted, "Could you be a little more specific?"

"Every night, the dead rise and march against us," he explained, abandoning some of the dramatics. "Dozens of them, maybe even hundreds, I don't know. There's more every night. The worst part is, they're already dead, so normal wounds don't seem to hurt them - you have to chop them apart. Most of my men are untrained and it's hard for the lads to deal that kind of damage even once, let alone over and over again all night long."

I looked over his shoulder and noticed that most of the men who'd been working on the barricades had stopped and sidled over to listen, so I lied and said, "Murdock, you're safe now. This is nothing I haven't dealt with before. I'm going to talk to Teagan about some strategy and then we're going to get down to business. By tonight, we'll be more than ready for these things."

Relief rippled visibly through the small crowd of frightened militia, and they all turned and pretended to go back to what they were doing. Murdock, however, narrowed his eyes at me.

"I don't know what you're thinking of, but there's no way you've ever fought something like this," he accused in a tense whisper so the men couldn't hear. "We're doomed and everyone knows it. You ought to get right out of town."

I blinked at him, genuinely shocked. Before I could find my voice, he turned and stalked off, shouting at Leliana to take her girly self off of the battlefield and stop distracting his men. I dragged everyone back inside to Teagan.

"Bann Teagan, the morale is super low out there, and Murdock isn't helping. I'd like your permission to organize rest and meal shifts so everyone naps and eats before sunset. If we're going to be up all night, we'd better be rested and fed. We should also plan on more food after midnight."

"That sounds practical," he agreed, and at my request, he led us back outside to introduce us and offer some kind words to the gathering of dispirited militia.

"Men," Teagan called in his rich voice, "Allow me to introduce you to Latitia and Alistair, the Gray Wardens!"

Teagan waved us forward and gave Alistair a pat on the back. He looked like he was going to be sick with stage fright. I looked at his white-knuckled grip on his sword hilt, and took over.

"I know everyone is tired. We dwarves have lived under siege for a centuries, and it sucks. But we've gotten pretty good at surviving, and tonight, that's exactly what Redcliffe will do: _survive_. I make you this promise, here and now: When the sun rises tomorrow, it will shine on our bloody victory and we will still be here!"

I waited for someone to throw a tomato, but most people seemed glad someone was doing something, even if it was a dwarven woman, so I plowed on. "Now, we need every man here fighting fit. We'll be up all night, so I want everyone to take a three-hour nap this afternoon, and eat a good meal. If you can't sleep, then just lie there and rest. If you're not hungry, too bad, eat anyway. No exceptions."

I held my arm out in front of me, drawing a line to bisect the crowd. "Everyone on that side of the square, you nap from one until four, and eat dinner at six. Everyone on the other side, you nap from four until seven, and eat dinner right after you wake up. Now, if you'll excuse us, we have to fort up."

I dragged the terrified Alistair down along the edge of the crowd towards the smithy to repair his armor. Plenty of muttering followed along behind us, but I was pleased to hear more of the "thank goodness" kind than the "who does that bitch think she is" variety.

The overworked smith grudgingly repaired Alistair's armor and also sold me a new suit of studded leathers. I let Alistair pull the accursed chainmail over my head with a sigh of relief and stood still for the fitting, the supple leather smooth and luscious against my skin after the cold metal links.

I pawed through the shop's wares and also picked up a coil of steel wire, pair of wire snips and a few pairs of locking needle-nose pliers, which I asked the bemused smith to cut the handles off of so I could use them as tripwire clamps.

Then we went to the inn, where the innkeeper had started selling sundries after the owner of the general store had been killed. He introduced himself as Lloyd, and sold Alistair and me new tunics, and also gave me new trousers to replace the old half-shredded ones and - most precious of all - deliciously thick wool socks and a wool jacket. His redheaded daughter Bella expertly hemmed up the trousers for me and I was ready to go.

Alistair and I spent most of the afternoon helping arrange barricades and fences to corral the walking dead into choke points and keep them away from the archers, while Morrigan and Leliana helped prepare first aid supplies. Even Rocky helped by digging trenches. Defense centered around the Chantry steps, and at my request, some additional archer's nests were slapped together at the top of the steps, using old crates and barrels. I wanted as many corpses dead as possible (which sounded ridiculous, even in my head) before they reached the melee fighters. At one o'clock, I had to run around yelling at people to make them go and rest, and I severely doubted anyone would sleep, but even just lying down and being quiet would help.

As the light began to grow golden in the early afternoon, we all took our leave and trooped into the inn for naps. Leliana and Morrigan contentedly locked themselves in their own rooms, but Alistair followed me into my room and hung around trying to discuss strategy and whether we should fight with Ser Perth or on the Chantry steps, not getting the hint when I kicked off my boots and started fiddling around with my blankets.

"You're keeping me up during my naptime," I said finally. He hesitated, and for a moment I saw the worry he had been trying to ignore by keeping busy.

"All right," he agreed eventually. "Sorry to bother you." And he turn and left, shutting the door behind him.

The inn's rather spare accommodations included a washbasin, a bed, and a small table. I stripped and used the water in the basin to wash off days' worth of grime. My new, dry, clean tunic felt amazing and I didn't have the heart to imprison my poor toes in socks any sooner than necessary, so I jumped into bed and invited Rocky to lie on my feet and warm them up.

Obviously, I didn't sleep. But I didn't want to just lie there freaking out, either, so I practiced the mental game I used for hiding. I focused so hard on being 'not there' that I almost didn't hear the soft tap on the door.

"Latitia?"

I sighed. I should have tied the man down. "You're supposed to be in bed."

"I can't sleep. Can you?"

"Not anymore."

"Maker, I'm sorry! I just assumed you'd be awake. I'll go -"

"No, I'm just teasing," I relented. "Come on in."

He pushed the door open and came in, then looked around at the lack of seating. I nudged Rocky to tell him to let Alistair sit on the foot of the bed. He gave me a look that said, "Who, me?" so I poked him harder, and he finally heaved himself up and went and flopped in the corner with an offended grunt. Alistair sat down gingerly, being very careful not to sit on my feet.

"Guess what," I asked him.

"You're secretly a werewolf and tonight's the full moon?" he guessed.

"No, better than that."

"You're the Empress of Orlesia?"

"I'm clean! It's amazing!" I held up my arms so he could see my new tunic. "And I have fresh clothes!"

"Aha! I thought there was something missing - it was the stench," he teased.

"No, it was the peace and quiet, now that I've let you in the room," I retorted.

I'd only been joking, but his face fell, and I realized he probably hadn't come in here just for verbal sparring. "What's wrong?" I asked.

"I'm worried about the Arl," he admitted. My heart sank. There wasn't much I could do about this one.

"Tomorrow, we're going to storm the castle and rescue everyone. Then we will discover the nature of his illness, and we will find the cure," I said with more conviction than I felt.

"Oh, is that all? We'll be done before lunch," he muttered.

He returned his gaze to his clasped hands and rubbed at his knuckles and their complicated mess of armor-related callouses. I watched and considered whether I ought to ask, whether it would help to talk about his real fear - the compound loss of Duncan and the Arl, and how this would leave him ultimately without family.

"You've had a rough week," I said finally. The absurd understatement made him smile briefly.

"You could say that."

I considered some more and decided to go for broke. "Do you want to talk about Duncan?"

He shrugged, and I watched him hold his breath, eyes squeezed shut, until he got control of himself again and answered me. "I guess. I mean, you didn't really know him."

"He saved my life. He showed me kindness and made me feel worthy for the first time," I told him, a bit wistfully. "I wish we'd all had more time together."

Alistair nodded. "He - what he did for me was a lot like that. I was miserable and lonely at the Chantry. I didn't want to be a Templar. He made the Chantry let me join him; he had to use the Rite of Conscription. They didn't want to let me go."

"You're very valuable. Duncan's a smart man and he saw that."

He snorted. "I think they just don't like letting any of their Templars go. They keep everything about the order secret." He sat for several more breaths while I waited.

"I just wish I had something to remember him by," he burst out, and I heard tears edging into his voice. "I wish I could give him a proper burial. I hate thinking about him just lying there on a battlefield, feeding the crows."

"We can't honor his body," I said slowly, "but we can honor his spirit. He rescued us both, and we can use our second chances to stop this Blight. And then, once it's over, if you want, we can have a memorial."

"I would like that... He told me once he came from Highever. I'd like to go there and maybe see about setting something up in his honor, when this is all over. I don't think he had any family to remember him."

"He had you," I said simply. He looked up quickly and met my eyes, as if checking to see if I was mocking him, but I meant it. "I'd like to go with you, if you don't mind," I added.

He smiled and looked back at his hands. "Thank you. And you're right, we're doing the right thing here. He would want us to stop the Blight, no matter what. I'm sorry for - for being such a mess about all this. I shouldn't-"

"Oh, no," I cried, sitting up quickly and putting a hand on his shoulder. "Don't ever be ashamed to feel - I mean, I know you loved him. You're allowed to be sad. And, may I say, I'm honored that you trusted me enough to come here, instead of sitting alone in your room."

"So I'm not a bad man anymore for disobeying?" he asked, sounding more normal now.

"You're still a bad man, but it's because you didn't bring food," I said, pushing off the blanket and looking for my socks. "I'm starving."

Then I remembered I was only wearing my tunic and, although it covered my assets, my legs were bare underneath. "Um, don't look," I said belatedly, grabbing my trousers and pulling them on as quickly as possible.

"Not looking," he replied, voice muffled. I glanced at him and saw he had covered his face with both hands.

"Oh come on, am I that ugly?" I teased, pulling his hands away. "I'm decent now, it's safe. Sorry about that."

After a dinner of 'traditional' lamb and pea stew, we climbed the hill to join Ser Perth and his men stationed by the castle gates. Previous attacks had always come first from the gates, so starting up there seemed sensible. The spike fences would hopefully funnel the onslaught into single file, preventing them from coming at us too quickly.

I had spent some time setting up a potent acid trap at the choke point,with Morrigan's help brewing the acid, and felt rather pleased with my work. I tested the tripwire one last time and listened with satisfaction to its thrumming before turning back to stand with the knights. Ser Perth gave final instructions to his men, generally along the lines of "Stand fast, my good men! Strike hard and true!" and other such useless drivel. I gathered my own 'troops' for consultation.

"Morrigan, you're the only mage here, so we'll need you to keep yourself safe and conserve your strength. Don't waste magic unless it saves someone's life. Rocky, guard Morrigan." He barked and moved to stand next to her.

"Ugh, can't he guard me from farther away? He reeks," she complained.

"Would you prefer Alistair?" I asked mildly, and she scowled.

"Alistair, what I actually want you to do is see to it Sir Swords-for-Brains doesn't get himself, or anyone else, killed. Don't let them get surrounded - you know how to use your shield to keep those shamblers off their backs." He nodded.

"Personally, I'm going to be opportunistic, as usual. I'll be cutting hamstrings and doing my best to scramble brains; I certainly won't be lopping off heads with these," I looked ruefully at my beloved daggers, "But I'm not cut out for heavier weapons, so I'll have to get clever. And now... we wait."

We all turned to face the path and waited as the shadows deepened. I fingered the hilts of my daggers, rubbing the twisted leather grips, fairly vibrating with nervous excitement. I caught Alistair's eye and grinned wolfishly. He looked momentarily startled, then grinned back and rolled his shoulders, settling his armor into place.

Then, a thick green fog rolled slowly down the mountain, emanating from the castle gates. "Steady, men!" Perth called. "Keep away from that mist - Andraste only knows what foul magic infuses it."

From inside the fog, we heard the sinuous slither of chainmail and clank of armored boots. Gradually, the emerald-green gleam of undead eyes shone brighter and brighter, until the first of the shambling corpses came into clear view. Its head bobbed on its slack neck, mouth hanging open in a silent scream of unimaginable horror, eyes wide and dead and shining with the force of the necromancy that powered its unnatural existence. It staggered forward with surprising speed, and with a wince, I realized it would likely trigger the trap itself before any others came into range. Oh well, it was still a nice trap.

Sure enough, with a twang and a _whoomph, _the trap sprang, spewing its acid over the advancing corpse, etching the stones and melting the surrounding grass. The creature shrieked, a dry and dusty sound, and to my satisfaction the sound was echoed back by two other shamblers still hidden in the fog. _Good range on that one_, I congratulated myself. The first horror collapsed in a sizzling heap, and the others came into view, flesh melting off bone but still powered by their obscene magic.

"Let's have at it!" Alistair bellowed, and the he and the soldiers charged forward to block the shambling corpses inside the funnel.

It wasn't really a battle; it was more like chopping wood, only the wood fought back. The men corralled the undead and hacked them apart, leaving still-writhing piles of twisted limbs and desiccated flesh blocking the road. Morrigan stayed at range easily, and after some time I released Rocky from guarding her and sent him howling into the fray. The dog gleefully tackled a clumsy shambler, seizing the neck and worrying it until bone crunched and nerves tore.

My frustration at my ineffectiveness in this kind of fight built up until I finally abandoned all attempts to help the melee warriors, snatching Alistair's healing salve from his belt pack and dragging a fallen knight out of the battlefield, busying myself attending to him, instead. By and large, the men worked better together than I had expected, mainly because their heavy plate mail protected them from the undead's clumsy swipes.

Alistair had an ingenious idea fairly soon in the battle, and began bashing the falling bodies of defeated corpses with deliberate force, piling them in heaps that strengthened the barricades. I interceded occasionally and dragged out a wounded but excessively brave knight, bullying him into letting me tend his wounds before releasing him to rejoin his mates.

And then, with a squish, the last corpse fell to its final death. We looked up the path, but the wind was gradually dissipating the mist and it appeared that this wave, at least, was successfully repulsed.

"All right, everyone, break time!" I called, beckoning them over and handing out water bottles and biscuits. The men clapped each other on the back in masculine companionship.

I tapped Morrigan's shoulder and asked her if she was all right, and if she minded me calling Rocky away from her. With typical confidence, she scoffed at the danger and insisted she did not require the "odoriferous presence" of my dog.

I left her doing some sort of maintenance on her staff, and examined Rocky for injuries. He had several shallow cuts, and I smeared small amounts of salve in them, afraid to waste our rapidly-diminishing supply. Eventually he shook himself and moved out from under my hand, clearly indicating he didn't find my attentions necessary.

I went over to sit on the ground next to Alistair. He was literally caked in gore, and had pulled out a filthy handkerchief to wipe ineffectively at his face, mostly just smearing it around. I helped him pull off his helmet, then had him lean back so I could pour water over his face. He spat and tugged off a disgusting gauntlet to rub at his eyes.

"That's a _lot_ of blood," he stated, when he'd finally cleared his mouth.

"Your tactical mind is very impressive," I told him. "When I realized you'd stacked up those bodies into a wall, I was floored."

"Actually, I'm just lazy. Why break my back using stakes and stones when these guys carry themselves?" He laughed, but I could tell he was pleased.

"Do you have any cuts we should look at?" I asked. "I can't tell under all the blood and guts."

"Nope, just some bruises," he said with a smile. "Don't tell them I said this, but those men seriously don't know how to use a shield. There's no reason they should have been so badly hurt."

"Half of them don't use shields, they have greatswords."

"My point exactly! The worst way to use a shield is not to use it at all," he said piously.

We were all stretched out and resting when a very young militiaman ran breathlessly up from Redcliffe Town. "They're coming up from the lake!" he gasped, bent double and bracing his hands on his knees for support. "Please, you've got to help!"

I looked at Ser Perth. "Will your men be able to hold this pass alone?"

"Certainly, my lady," the knight replied. "If we have need, we will send for you. Go."

We snatched up our equipment, Alistair jammed on his helmet, and we ran full-tilt downhill towards the town square. A truly absurd number of shambling corpses had dragged themselves, dripping and howling, out of the lake and beset the militia. Here and there, amid the mangled corpses, lay the limp body of a fallen militiaman. Already, two of the barricade rings had been overrun, and the melee fighters had fallen back to the foot of the Chantry stairs, desperately striving to protect the remaining archers. I was very glad I'd made them build a third ring of fences and archer's nests.

Rocky and Alistair fell upon the ravening mob from behind, sending limbs and skulls flying. Morrigan strode alongside the barricade and braced herself, hands outstretched, releasing a wave of intense cold that froze an entire row of undead solid, before running smoothly up the stairs to stand behind the archers and prepare her next spell. I followed in Alistair's wake, delivering the final death to the bodies he flung aside in his savage rush to drive the mob away from the vulnerable archers.

Within minutes, we'd destroyed the entire wave of shambling corpses. The creatures had not even looked back at us, too driven to kill their original targets to respond to the arrival of a new threat. The frightened town militia came hesitantly out to help shore up the outer barricades, and I checked on the bodies of the fallen, looking for any who could be saved. Most had succumbed to their wounds, but Leliana came out and helped me drag a few of them inside the Chantry and into Mother Hannah's more capable hands.

"How is everyone inside holding up?" I asked her.

"They're frightened, of course," she said. "But they're stronger than they look. We've been singing hymns." She half-carried the last man inside, closing the door behind her, and I heard bolts and bars slam home to seal the door.

Then the gurgling shrieks of a fresh wave of waterlogged corpses climbing up from the lake caused the militia to scramble quickly behind the second barricade. I looked at their terrified faces and knew there was no way they'd be willing to try to defend the outermost barricade, not with the smaller and more secure-feeling one behind them, so I vaulted in with them and beckoned Alistair and Rocky over.

"Rocky, you can fight with Alistair, but also guard Morrigan and those archers." I pointed. "Do you understand? You can fight, but you must also protect _those archers_." I pointed again. He barked.

I tugged Alistair down to my level and muttered quietly to him. "This is gonna be a lot harder. Let's try to keep everyone alive, but we might have to make some hard decisions. If someone does something stupid, don't endanger yourself or abandon the others to try to rescue him. Got it?"

"That's cold," he accused.

"No, it's the way we'll keep the most people alive in the long run. We can't afford to lose you, even for a few minutes. Rocky's just a dog, Morrigan's practically naked and I am no more useful in this fight than these militiamen."

His face set. "I understand."

The shouts of the archers from the higher ground alerted us to a fresh onslaught. A flight of arrows buried themselves in the shambling brutes, felling a few with lucky strikes to the throat or face. The archers managed a second volley before the first of the undead reached the barricade and the melee began.

At first, we were able to keep it under control, lopping off heads and anything else that appeared over or around the barricades. Then, to my growing horror, I realized that the far side of the barricade was piled so deeply with bodies by now that the remaining attackers could run right up the sides, as more and more of them successfully clambered over the spiked fence and assaulted the men behind it.

Then a scream alerted me to a new danger: A group of corpses had thrust their way between the barricade and the Chantry wall, and fallen upon the archers from behind. I ran up the stairs, calling to Rocky, and listened to the tinkling crash of frozen bodies shattering as Morrigan released a second blast of ice.

But that still left far too many up there for the lightly-armored archers to withstand. In frustration, I tore a sword from the death grip of a fallen militiaman and climbed the stairs, flailing about with it. Again, the numbly determined corpses ignored me, and I chopped at their bodies and arms but lacked the strength to destroy them. I switched my aim to their legs, and started whacking through tendons and sending them toppling over backwards. Now I could reach their necks, and with gravity on my side, I experienced the savage joy of sending skulls flying.

Rocky arrived in a whirl of fangs and claws, and I turned my attention to the archers themselves. Several leaned heavily on crates, clutching bleeding wounds; I did not dare to unbar the Chantry doors and bring them inside, so I tried to stabilize them myself while Rocky protected my back, a living wall of flesh and teeth.

Crouched over the slumped form of a youthful blond archer, I felt a stab of dread as my fingers scraped the bottom of the crock of healing salve. Desperate to conserve the last of it, I made a difficult decision: I ordered a bald man with a gut wound to hide and apply pressure, directed an ashen-faced woman with a crushed arm to flee, and spent my attentions on the two remaining men whose wounds could be treated quickly and allow them to return to battle.

I was helping the second man to his feet when I felt a tickling pulse of energy pass through me and looked up in time to see a ring of undead fall bonelessly to the ground, revealing an exhausted Morrigan, leaning on her staff but smiling with grim satisfaction. Alistair had frozen in surprise, sword raised, as his opponent collapsed like a rag doll, and around him the remaining militia drooped with fatigue.

"What did you do?" I demanded. "And more importantly, why didn't you do it earlier?"

"I thought it could not work against creatures with no minds," she explained, hoarse with exertion. "But when left with no other options, I took a gamble. T'would appear it paid off. Evidently, the spell disrupted the necromancer's link to its minions."

"You bet your skinny butt it did!" I exulted. "Can you do it again if they come back?"

She grimaced. "Perhaps, but not for some time yet."

I gave her a grateful smile and started to reach out to squeeze her hand, but saw her flinch from my touch and stopped myself with a muttered apology. I turned and scrambled down the stairs to Alistair, barely recognizable under the gore as he leaned heavily against the barricade to catch his breath. I touched his arm gingerly, and a stringy scrap of flesh stuck to my glove.

"Eww," I commented. "Is any of this yours?"

"Mostly no," he said, shaking goop off his gauntlets. "I took a swipe to the leg here-" he pointed to a rent in the armor that protected his thigh, "but it's not bad."

"We're almost out of this stuff," I warned, showing him the almost-empty crock. "I want to save it in case you need it later. Is that OK?"

He shrugged. "Sure, let's just tie on a bandage instead, quick, before any more come."

But it seemed the bulk of the dead army had been destroyed. A few more stragglers crawled out of the water, which the men easily chopped apart. I took water around to everyone, dragged the wounded inside the Chantry, and sat on the stairs with the others to wait for the dawn. When the eastern sky lightened, so did our spirits; and when the first ray of sunlight struck the sparkling lake, a great cheer rose from our throats and we all jumped up and ran around giving bear hugs, hooting with relief and joy at survival.

"All right, nap time," I said finally. "Alistair, Morrigan, let's get out of here. We've got an overdue appointment with our beds."

I led us back to the inn, empty and silent because its usual occupants had stayed in the Chantry, and Morrigan immediately disappeared into her room. I watched her go, noting her bowed head, and decided to check on her in a little while. First, though, I wanted to make sure my knight in bloody armor made it up the stairs before falling asleep.

"Give me that," I ordered, pulling his filthy shield away from him, and when I touched his arm I noticed him trembling with exhaustion.

"Why didn't you tell me you were so tired?" I scolded, taking away his helmet as well and tucking it under my arm. He gave me a wan smile and I dragged him into the kitchen, where I shucked off his disgusting equipment, bent him over a tub and poured cold water from the kitchen pump over his head and hands until the water ran clean, then followed him up the stairs to his room. When he reached out to open the door, he winced and rolled his shoulders uncomfortably.

"Are you getting stiff already?" I asked, worried. If only I could get hot water in this blasted Stone-forsaken backward dump of a town, we could _both_ have a nice bath.

"I'll be fine," he muttered, shuffling inside and closing the door. I heard a thump as he flopped onto his bed.

Muttering to myself about stoic men, I padded down the hall and stood outside Morrigan's door, listening. I heard a page turn and decided she must be writing something in her grimoire, probably the effect her mind spell had had. I knocked lightly on the door.

"By all means, interrupt my sleep," came her sardonic reply.

"I heard you writing," I called through the door. "Unless you write in your sleep, you're still up."

"Ah, so you were eavesdropping! That is much better than simply barging in."

I opened the door and slipped in, shutting it quietly behind me. "I thought so myself."

Morrigan had pulled her nightstand over so she could sit on her bed and write at the same time. She snapped the book shut as I entered and I avoided looking at it, since she obviously didn't want me to. Instead, I gestured at the edge of the bed farthest from where she sat. "May I sit?" I asked.

"Suit yourself."

I sat, facing the wall and looking in her general direction without making eye contact, noting wryly that I had started treating her like a shy dog.

"I just wanted to thank you for your help during the night. As ever, your magic is impressive and invaluable." She acknowledged my words with a very slight nod and just the tiniest ghost of a smile.

"I don't remember seeing that version of your ice magic before," I continued. "Is it new?"

"No spell is truly new. However, it is new for me to cast it. Your 'quest' affords me many opportunities to practice," she said, aiming a sardonic smile at me like a crossbow.

"Well, it sure did work - a whole column of them, turned to ice statues! Very ugly ones." I mimed a dead-eyed ghoul being frozen in a laughably awkward position, and she huffed - was that a laugh? Why yes, I think it was!

"Oh, also, I wanted to ask you if you know anything we can do for sore muscles," I added, thinking of Alistair. She raised an elegant eyebrow, and I grinned a bit sheepishly.

She eyed me for a long moment before apparently making some sort of internal decision, and bent to pull a small leather pouch from her satchel. "Give your insufferable Templar some tea made with this," she instructed, handing me the pouch. "The correct dose is one ounce of herb for five ounces of boiled water. Steep for eight minutes, then drink."

I clutched the pouch to my chest and gave my effusive thanks, then started to get up before remembering something.

"Are you going to sleep as a wolf?" I asked, a bit shyly.

She narrowed her eyes at me. "Why?"

"I wanted to ask if I could watch you shift," I admitted.

She laughed. "I intended to disrobe beforehand. 'Tis much more difficult to do with clothes on."

"I don't mind," I assured her quickly. "It's just us girls. Dwarves aren't such prudes about these things, anyway."

"Fine then," she decided, and stood to pull her tiny excuse for a robe over her head. Then she shimmered, and with a soft whispering sound, re-formed as the shaggy gray wolf I'd seen before.

I clapped my hands and squealed with delight. The wolf dropped to its haunches and laughed at me, its tongue lolling out.

"Is it really you?" I pretended to be a little afraid, reaching one hand out tentatively. She bared her teeth, and I jumped, which seemed to thoroughly amuse her; apparently satisfied by her ability to frighten me, she took a step forward and nudged my hand with her wet nose before turning her back and bedding down, ostentatiously curling her tail over her eyes.

"OK, I'll stop bugging you," I agreed. "Thank you so, so much for letting me watch. And thank you for the herbs, too. Sleep well."

I clattered down the stairs and into the kitchen, where Lloyd had finally returned and set up the stove. I apologized for the bloody mess, but the man insisted on cleaning it up for me, claiming it was the least he could do. Then I borrowed a mug and brewed Alistair's tea. It smelled foul and I wished I had asked her about maybe adding some honey or something, but I didn't want to intrude on her again.

Walking carefully so as not to spill, I returned to Alistair's room and knocked on the door, then knocked harder when he didn't respond.

"Nnngg," I head him complain.

"I'm coming in," I warned. When he didn't protest, I opened the door and entered, leaving it open a crack to let in some light. He lay facedown on top of his blankets, pillow over his head.

"I have something that's supposed to help with the sore muscles," I told him softly, rubbing his shoulder to wake him. "Come on, the sooner you drink it, the sooner I'll go away and let you sleep."

He groaned and heaved himself upright, moving slowly and obviously uncomfortable. I handed him the mug, and he grimaced at the horrible smell but gulped it down anyway before flopping down again. I yanked the covers out from under his unresisting body and tossed them over him before returning, at long last, to my own warm and welcoming bed.


	13. Storming the Castle

A polite knock at my door forced awake after what felt like only a few minutes of precious sleep. I grunted my acknowledgement to the innkeeper, Lloyd, who had agreed to act as alarm clock, and rubbed my eyes, trying to wake up. The welcome scents of baking bread and simmering stew provided much better motivation than mere duty, and my empty belly finally drove me to sit up and grope for my boots. Rocky gave me a look of deepest disgust from his position at the foot of my bed.

"You can stay here and skip lunch if you want," I told him, "But you're going to have to come with us to the castle afterwards."

He grunted and laid his head down, determined to snatch any extra minute of sleep. I shuffled down the hall and tapped on Alistair's door, then opened it.

"Nnnng," he mumbled, pulling the pillow over his head.

"That's what you said this morning, and it didn't work then, either." I fumbled to light the unfamiliar candles. Why didn't they use lamps like normal people? "How do you feel?"

"Like the walking dead. I think undeath must be contagious," he groaned, sitting up and putting his head in his hands.

I hopped up to sit on the edge of the bed beside him. "Are you still really sore, or just tired?"

"Both," he said, "although not as sore as I was. But in the future, just let me be in pain - that tea was truly vile."

"Crybaby," I teased, then knelt behind him and ran both hands across his shoulders and upper arms, feeling for the extra heat of sore muscles. He flinched and I let go immediately.

"What are you doing?" He craned his neck to look behind him and I showed him my empty hands.

"No tricks," I promised. "I just thought you might feel better after a backrub."

"Oh," he said, looking wide awake now and tensed like a bird braced for flight.

I threw up my hands and moved to jump off the bed. "If I'm that scary, then I'm not going to do you any good. I'll meet you downstairs."

"I'm not scared," he declared - automatically, I suspected. "Do your worst, I dare you."

I smiled inwardly and repositioned myself, resting my hands lightly atop his shoulders. He didn't flinch this time, so I repeated my checkup. Sore biceps, sore, um, whatever that muscle is between the neck and the shoulder, sore spot on the left across the shoulder blade... More sore spots along the spine...

"Did a sodding _cart_ run you over when I wasn't looking?" I demanded, beginning to lose track of them all. He chuckled softly and I dug my thumbs into that muscle I can't ever remember the name of but everyone likes it rubbed. When he didn't wince, I upped the pressure until he groaned, under his breath, as if he didn't want me to hear his pleasure.

"Elfroot doesn't grow underground," I told him as I crossed off one muscle at a time on my to-do list. "And no healing magic. No mages, you know. So dwarva have gotten creative about other things you can do to get better faster."

"Mmh," he grunted, letting his head hang, and I took the hint and shut up.

When my hands finally tired, I crawled back to the edge of the bed and hopped off, crossing to the nightstand and pouring water from the jug for us both. He sighed and stretched and raked his hands through his hair while I drained my glass.

"I'm hungry for lunch," I said, setting the glass back down with a clink. "Shall I wait for you?"

"No, I want to wash up," he said, getting to his feet and digging around in his pack for his towel. I turned to go.

"Thank you," he added, and I paused in the doorway. "I do feel better."

"Anytime." I gave him a smile, and shut the door behind me before going down for some of Redcliffe Inn's eternal stew.

Morrigan waited for me at the corner table, bread-bowl already sitting empty before her.

"Aren't you going to eat your bread?" I asked her, hopping up on the bench, which was just barely too tall for me to sit comfortably so I scooted into the corner and sat sideways instead, leaning on the plastered wall.

She sniffed disdainfully. "Bread is unnatural."

I raised an eyebrow at her, then reached across and grabbed the large, crusty bun that the inn used instead of bowls. The thick stews favored by the innkeep did not soak through the bread, and by the time the stew had been eaten, the gravy-soaked bread had become tender and delicious. I thought this system marvelously efficient and also very satisfying. I took her spoon, too, and scooped out the soft inner part of the bread.

"Mmm," I moaned, rolling my eyes in exaggerated pleasure, trying to provoke her. She obliged by rolling her own eyes, scoffing at me for my disgusting habits.

Rocky and Alistair came down together and Alistair took a chair. Rocky slunk under the table to den at my feet, and I passed the crust down to him, dropping it quickly to avoid his snapping teeth. Eventually I might have to ask someone about that, because someday he would take someone's finger off.

The beaming Lloyd brought us our own steaming bowls of stew personally, patting Alistair on the back and effusing over the honor of serving him while the displaced Bella hovered nervously. I smirked at Alistair and he blushed, as he always did when people just assumed he was in charge. Surely the scrawny dwarf woman and the half-naked barbarian ice queen were merely followers of this tall, handsome warrior, right?

I frowned, noting the description I'd just used for him and wondering when I had decided a _human_ could be handsome, but the thought evaporated when I burned my tongue on the stew again.

"Blasted Stone-forsaken _stew_! Why is it always so hot!" I demanded rhetorically, gulping cold water.

"You're right," Alistair grinned at me mercilessly. "We should stop what we're doing and mount a crusade against hot food. We will leave a trail of mangled stoves and crushed pots all across the nation! Cold meat for everyone!"

I scowled at him, stirring my stew and blowing on it impatiently. We were both ravenous and the delighted Bella refilled our bowls twice, laughing about Gray Warden hunger before tucking a sack full of dinner rolls into Alistair's pack. As I chewed doggedly at the last piece of crust, Tomas, the young bowman from yesterday, entered the inn and came over, bobbing his head in a nervous approximation of a bow and informing Alistair that Bann Teagan wanted to meet us by the windmill.

The mood in the town square had lightened considerably, but people still scurried quickly about their chores, shoulders stiff with apprehension. No one knew whether tonight would be a repeat of last night, or whether we would be able to do anything at all about the situation, or if - Stone forbid, but the thought lay heavy on all our minds - we might not make it back, leaving the town alone when the night returned.

On our way up to the windmill, Rocky, who had been looping around us with his nose to the ground, suddenly skidded to a stop to dig furiously in a patch of weeds. Dirt and gravel fountained up behind him and Alistair swung his shield in front of me, knocking a sizable chunk of rock out of the air before it decorated my face.

"Thanks," I said, startled.

"Anytime," he winked.

Rocky pranced back to me, carrying a tangled mess of roots in his mouth, head held high and stumpy tail wiggling with excitement. "Elfroot!" I cried, taking the bundle. "What a good _boy_! Thank you! What a _good_ boy!" I patted him and he threw himself to the ground on his back, so I crouched and rubbed his belly and chest while he writhed in an ecstasy of happiness.

"Does that feel good?" I cooed, bending over him and ruffling his fur with both hands. "Yes it does! Is he a happy doggy? Does a doggy like his belly rubbed? Oh _yes_!" He twitched when I touched a spot under his armpit. "Does he have an itchy spot?" I asked, and scratched at his ribs, causing his back leg to kick rhythmically.

Now, animals I understood – pet a dog, it feels good, he's happy, you're happy. None of this personal-space bullshit that seemed so important to everyone up on the limitless expanse of the surface world.

I was sprawled all over him when Morrigan cleared her throat behind me, causing me to jump in embarrassment at having an audience while I made a fool of myself over my dog. I held out the roots to her, and she wrinkled her nose at the slobber but took them anyway.

"I shall return to the inn and lay these out to dry," she stated, and strode off without waiting for a reply.

"Come on, we don't need her to talk to Teagan anyway," Alistair said quickly, and we climbed the rest of the hill to the mighty windmill and its ceaselessly turning vanes. Between it and the smith's waterwheel, the town never lacked power. Bann Teagan stood ready for action before the windmill, the rough shape of armor visible beneath his brightly colored surcoat.

"Good, you're here and we still have at least six hours of daylight left," he greeted us with relief, and immediately got down to business. "I have a way into the castle. My family has long guarded a secret - this castle has an underground passage that travels beneath the lake and comes up through the castle basement."

I nudged Alistair. "Secret doors, secret passages," I noted with a wicked gleam in my eye. "Maybe we can skulk. I haven't skulked in ages. Did you bring your skulking shoes?"

He snorted, amused. "I think that's the most times I've heard the word 'skulk' in my entire life."

"It's a good word," I said with dignity. "My people have a proud skulking tradition."

"The dwarves?"

"The scoundrels."

He laughed, but sobered quickly at Teagan's scarcely concealed frown. Maybe the Bann was having some second thoughts about pinning the town's hopes on these clowns. Not my problem, though. He didn't have the entire Blight weighing on him.

We waiting until Morrigan returned, and entered the windmill. A trapdoor, buried under burlap sacks and barely visible beneath decades of chaff, dust and mouse droppings, clicked open easily when Teagan slipped his ring into a tiny slot. He had no sooner reached for the handle, though, when we heard running steps behind us.

"Teagan! Wait!" A woman's breathless voice came to us, and we turned to see a dainty noblewoman wearing a dress that had probably been quite fine several days ago but now bore stains and wrinkles, her fashionable hairdo askew and tendrils of her bangs falling across her face.

She ran to Teagan and clung to his surcoat. "Please," she begged, her voice delicately accented like Leliana's, "You must come with me. It has Connor - it has my son, my only son! Please! Connor won't leave - he - he's seen too much death and has despaired. But I know he will listen to you. You are his uncle, he loves you! Please, come and help me free Connor!"

"Who is this lady?" I demanded quietly of Alistair, annoyed at being ignored.

"That's the Arlessa Isolde, Arl Eamon's wife," he whispered back.

"_That_ bitch?" I exclaimed, and I must have forgotten to whisper because Isolde stopped her begging and turned coldly to me.

"Excuse me, but who are you?" she inquired with icy politeness.

"Ah, my lady, that is Latitia and of course you remember Alistair. They are Gray Wardens," Teagan added, placing emphasis on the title and laying his hand lightly on Isolde's arm to restrain her. "They have agreed to help in any way they can."

"They can help by letting you come with me," she snapped, obviously close to the breaking point.

"Why do you need me, specifically?" he asked gently. "Why not let us all come and help?"

"I - I can only bring you," she wailed, eyes wild. "There is a - a monster that holds Connor, and I managed to convince it to let me out and beg you to come. Please, it will kill Connor if I do not do as it orders!"

"Why do I get the feeling you aren't telling us everything?" I asked in a tone heavy with suspicion. "First you say Connor refused to leave, then you say some monster holds him. Does Connor need rescuing, or merely convincing? Why does it matter that Connor loves Teagan? Doesn't he also love you, his mother? And why would some monster order you to bring Teagan? Why would it allow anyone in at all?"

"Why, that is a very impertinent question!" Arlessa Isolde declared, trying to salvage some shred of dignity.

"Impertinent for a dwarf, you mean? That's racist," I warned. It was petty, but I had already hated the woman before I even met her, and she wasn't doing much to change my mind.

"No, I didn't mean-" she floundered, but Teagan rescued her.

"If it may help Connor, then I must go," he said firmly. "Isolde, go apart a ways; I must speak with the Wardens."

The Arlessa looked for a moment like she might refuse, but finally turned and stalked out of the windmill to sit outside.

"You can't go," I blurted immediately. "It's suicide."

"I must. It is my duty," Teagan declared with perfect solemnity. I stared at him incredulously, but he turned now to Alistair.

"You must go in without me," he said, gripping Alistair's shoulder encouragingly. "Take my ring so you can go in and out as you please. And do hurry, if you can. I will try to stall for time, but I do not know how long this monster she speaks of will remain passive. It is surely the source of the undead, so perhaps it is nocturnal."

"We will find you before nightfall," Alistair promised, returning the shoulder squeeze before pulling off an armored gauntlet to slip the ring on his finger for safekeeping. Teagan went outside, climbing the hill towards the castle gates behind the frantic Isolde.

"He's dead," I said flatly.

"He's a fool," Morrigan added.

"He's a good man," Alistair retorted, and turned to jerk open the trapdoor, its hinges squealing in protest. "Let's hurry and perhaps he need not make this sacrifice."

Slimy mold rendered the rough-hewn stairs treacherous, and cobwebs hung in great curtains across the hall. "Stop," I called, and went back upstairs, poking around until I found a long-handled broom and some twine. As I lashed the torch to the end of the broomstick, I recounted a particularly thrilling tale of Deep Roads adventure involving a nest of spiders that wove poisonous webs.

"...And I had to walk back to Orzammar butt-naked because all my clothes were poisoned," I concluded, handing the torch-stick to Alistair. "The moral of this story is, always burn the webs, never touch them."

"But we're nowhere near the Deep Roads," he protested, waving the torch dubiously.

"I think you're wrong," I told him, prodding him down the rest of the stairs. Sure enough, when the tunnel leveled out to travel under the lake, dwarven waterproofing technique was clearly visible in the rafting and the geometric, lyrium-inlaid runes etched along the walls.

"Nobody else could have built a tunnel under a lake to last for hundreds of years without repair," I said smugly, laying my hands on the damp stone with reverence. "In fact, I'd be very surprised if this tunnel weren't here first and the castle was built over it, maybe even discovering the tunnel by accident while digging the basement. The Deep Roads used to connect the entire continent, you know."

"Well, blow me down, I had no idea," he said in wonder, holding the torch up to the runes.

We continued, then, down the gently sloping passage and through an ankle-deep puddle that had collected at the lowest point. I didn't need the torch; this was a true tunnel, its walls defined by the stone's own will, and its shape resonated deep in my body. The tunnel curved briefly to go around a fault in the bedrock before climbing a second set of stairs and coming up into a dungeon. For a moment, I was too distracted by the raw, wounded feeling where the true tunnel became an artificial human creation, so it took me a moment to realize where we now stood.

Prison cells lined the walls, bodies still hanging from thumbscrews and racks, and piles of moldering straw crawled with vermin. Alistair stopped dead at the entrance and I almost walked into him as he stared, aghast, at the dark secret of his childhood home. Rocky whined and sneezed, pawing at his nose against the dusty, cloying reek of ancient death. I craned my head to see around him and whistled softly.

"These are old corpses. Arl Eamon wouldn't have been involved in any of this - they all died before he was born," I reassured Alistair, laying a hand on his arm. "But at least we have some idea, now, where all those walking dead came from." He took a deep breath and coughed before smiling wanly at me and stepping forward.

"Actually, why don't you let me," I suggested. "It's dark down here and I can take a look around without anyone seeing me, but if you're following along with a torch and eighty pounds of rattling steel, well, you're aren't exactly subtle." He scowled, so I ducked under his arm and scurried off before he could object to me endangering myself.

I felt pretty good, now, as I slipped easily into the darkest shadows, using my ears as much as my eyes to find my way through the near-total blackness. Enjoying the granite under my soft-soled boots and the comforting weight of the earth above me, I explored down to the closed door at the end of the long corridor without finding any resistance. Deciding to lead the others up to that door before picking its lock, I turned back and - I couldn't resist - slunk around behind Alistair as he stood squinting down the hall. Rocky cocked his head at me but I shushed him with a gesture.

"Looking for me?" I asked cheerfully from behind Alistair. He jumped most satisfyingly, and I laughed.

"Maker's breath! I think you stopped my heart," he gasped, and I felt a little guilty for tormenting him and led him down the hall, explaining that I'd seen no-one alive in there.

Morrigan followed us closely as we walked, and I wondered whether the dark tunnel unnerved her. If it did, she gave no indication except for a willingness to stay with the group instead of wandering around constantly. And I thank the Stone that she did, because as soon as the light from Alistair's torch shone full into the cells, a great rattling moan spread out along the hall, and the rusted-out cell doors began to burst open with their decrepit contents lurching in mindless hatred towards the living.

Alistair shouted a warning and tossed the torch at me, trying to set his shield despite the clinging grasp of the walking dead that reached, howling in impotent rage, through the bars of its cage. Rocky leapt and his jaws crunched easily through the brittle bones, and Alistair finally managed to draw his sword.

Morrigan cried out, the closest to a scream I'd ever heard from her, and I turned to see her borne down by a crowd of clumsy but determined bodies. She struggled to form the gestures of her spell but their weight pinned her arms and intermittent bursts of unfocused magic sparkled around her. I jumped and waved the torch in the faces of the undead, and they shrieked a dusty cry of pain and fury, dropping her and scrambling away. Immediately, the tremendous force of her pent-up magic exploded down the tunnel, shattering a dozen or more of the howling corpses in a shower of ice. The blast knocked me flat, killing the torch and plunging the dungeon into darkness.

"Morrigan! Make fire!" I shouted, bouncing to my feet again and kicking the legs out from under a lurching body that had lunged at Alistair's back as he stood in blind confusion.

"I can't!" she wailed. "I can't work fire!"

"Then think of something!" I roared, ducking Alistair's wild swing before making my own attack on a small pack of newcomers who had just managed to shove open their door, bringing the broomstick down across their hungry arms and listening with surprise to the crackle of bone. Evidently the poor brutes were so old, even I could break them.

I grabbed Morrigan's arm, almost jerking her of her feet as I threw her to stand back-to-back with Alistair. "Stay there!" I commanded them both. "Make light, I don't care how!" Then I turned and, together with Rocky and his crushing jaws, sent clouds of dust and shards of bone flying.

Moments later, electricity crackled with shocking speed along the damp walls and ignited several of the decomposing piles of straw, much to the dismay of their scuttling denizens. I blinked, the forked afterimage seared into my sensitive eyes, and Rocky yelped in pain as a blow connected during his momentary blindness, but Alistair was back in the fight now and I gladly huddled against the wall and let him protect us while I waited for my eyes to adjust.

When the last dessicated body collapsed to the floor in several pieces, Alistair turned and grinned broadly at me, eyes bright and thrilling with adrenaline. "That was exciting," he said, wiping his sword. "I think we work well together."

"We sure do," I agreed, "And that means you, too, Morrigan. Are you all right, by the way? Did they hurt you?"

She shook her head mutely, trying to shake bits of who-knows-what out of her hair, her shoulders hunched and arms wrapped defensively around her belly, checkered with darkening bruises where they'd grabbed her. I frowned thoughtfully at her and decided the sooner we got her out of here, the better. When Alistair had re-lit the torch, I bent to pick the lock on the prison door, revealing a second dark corridor beyond. Morrigan sighed.

On the other side of the door, a cluster of slightly better-preserved corpses, more like the ones from last night, milled around in frustration outside a particular cell door, banging their blunted weapons against its bars and straining to reach whatever was inside. We readied ourselves to fight and approached cautiously; when we'd almost gotten within reach of them, they finally swung their hideously glowing eyes towards us and, baring their rotting teeth in a soundless scream, they attacked.

Morrigan seemed only too glad to wreak a little revenge, and the floor soon sparkled with icy fragments of long-dead flesh as Alistair crunched his way through the clumsy attackers. When it was safe, I approached the door curiously and shone the torchlight through its bars. Huddled in a shivering heap in the corner was a young man, about Alistair's age, but dressed in mage's robes and looking rather the worse for wear. He looked up at me, his eyes haunted, but when he saw we were no ghouls, he jumped up and clung to the bars of his cell.

"Oh, thank Andraste, someone alive," he cried, near tears with relief.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"My name is Jowan. I locked myself in here to hide but I'm out of water. I'll tell you everything, I swear, just please let me out of here!"

I thought about it and decided that the undead minions had been trying to kill him, so he must not be their ally, and unlocked his cage. He stumbled out wringing his hands in gratitude.

"What's going on here, man?" Alistair cut him off.

"It's all my fault," Jowan moaned. "The Arlessa brought me here to tutor her son, Connor. He had begun to show signs, and she didn't want the Circle to take him away, so she sought me out - an apostate - to teach him to control his magic." Alistair gasped in shock, and Jowan continued. "At first everything went well, but then the Arl... fell ill, and I think the boy tried to save him with magic, and in so doing, he opened himself up to something terribly evil."

Morrigan nodded. "It is the great danger facing any mage, particularly one young and untrained."

"Tell me about the Arl," Alistair urged. "What's wrong with him? Is he stable now? Did the magic work?"

Jowan's face twisted with shame. "I - the magic does seem to have stabilized him, but at terrible cost, as you can see. As for what's ailing him... It is poison. I poisoned him."

Alistair lunged and gripped the front of the mage's robes, lifting him off his feet and slamming him against the wall. "Fix it!" he shouted into Jowan's face. "Make it right or I swear, I'll make you wish you'd never been born!"

The mage hung dejectedly in his grip. "I already do," he whispered. "Teyrn Loghain told me Arl Eamon was a traitor and had to die to protect the kingdom. He told me if I succeeded, he would forgive my crimes of apostacy and let me return to the Circle. He said I would be a hero of Ferelden. I swear in the Maker's name, I am a patriot and thought I acted in the nation's best interest! I regret what I did every minute of the day and if you'll just let me live a while longer, I will do everything I can to undo this damage. Then you can judge me however you see fit."

My heart filled with pity. "Let him down," I told Alistair gently. "He's no villain. He put himself in great danger, believing he was protecting Ferelden; it's not his fault Loghain deceived him. He deceived us all, didn't he?"

Alistair grimaced and released his grip on the skinny mage. "Loghain has more and more to answer for," he spat, pulling off a gauntlet to rub tiredly at his eyes.

"That he does," I sighed. "But, Jowan, what do you think you can do here? How do you propose to help?"

"I can help banish the evil that possessed Connor," he explained, looking hopeful for the first time.

"Fine," I decided. "Stay here, then, where it's safer. Here's some supplies-" I handed him my water flask and the dinner rolls the innkeeper had given us. "We'll come get you when we've cleared a path to Connor."

"Thank you," Jowan said sincerely, clasping my hand. "I won't let you down."

We turned from him and walked to the end of the hall, where another heavy door stood. I tried to pick its lock, only to discover to my disgust that it had been barred. I wedged a dagger into the doorframe instead and laboriously raised the bar, swearing sulfurously when it slipped and fell back again.

"Allow me," Alistair said chivalrously, nudging me away from the door before aiming a solid kick at the ancient hinges. The screws jerked free from the rotting wood and the door crashed inwards with a satisfying bang and a great cloud of dust.

"My hero," I batted my eyelashes at him, and he grinned, stepping over the fallen door and into the wine cellar beyond. The torchlight reflected over rack upon rack of wine, and a shaft of light percolated its way through the dry air at the end of the cellar, indicating the way out. We strode quickly towards the stairs but I had a sudden feeling of wrongness and grabbed Alistair's elbow. Morrigan stepped on my heel in her haste and flinched away from the contact with an angry snarl at the halt.

"Wait," I muttered, peering into the shadows at the base of the stairs. What had I seen that bothered me? I swayed side to side to change the angle of my view, and saw it again: A tiny glint of light off a wire stretched across the second stair. I smiled grimly, and gestured for the others to back off and be silent - some traps were so sensitive even sound could set them off. I crept up to the wire, examining it carefully; it went directly into the wall with no evident trap mechanism. Well, if I couldn't disable it, I could at least disarm it. I pulled out two small tripwire clamps, attaching one to each end to prevent the wire retracting, and cut the wire before scrambling backwards in case the clamps failed.

Nothing happened.

"All right," I said, dusting off my hands, "I think that ought to hold it. Remind me to pick up more of those clamps later, because if I take them off, the trap will spring."

Alistair clapped me on the shoulder before bracing his shield over his head to climb the stairs, alert for possible ambush from the trapdoor at the top of the steep, narrow staircase. He lifted the door a crack and tilted his head to peer through, listening intently, but the landing seemed empty. He flipped open the door and it banged loudly on the stone tiles above.

"Ssh!" I scolded, and he gave me a sheepish look before leading us up into a pantry adjacent to the kitchens. The entire area reeked horribly of rotting food, pots and pans sitting abandoned on the burned-out stoves as though the kitchen staff had been interrupted right before dinner. A rattle and a moan from somewhere in front brought us up short.

"Wait," I breathed, and ducked under the long prep tables, slinking through their shadow until I could make a quick dash into the black hallway beyond. A second pantry opened in front of me, and flies buzzed angrily from inside. I gagged on the stench, dry-heaving involuntarily, and a sudden cloud of flies burst out through the door in advance of a grossly fat, lurching ghoul, shreds of rotting meat hanging from its slavering lips as it moaned again in unceasing hunger. I froze, sure it could not see me where I hid, but it paused, swaying, and scented the air before swinging its slack-eyed head toward me. I fled.

The others were ready and waiting, and I ducked behind the door as the ghoul staggered with surprising speed into the kitchen. It bellowed stupidly and shifted its attention to Rocky, who probably looked most edible. As it lunged and Alistair set himself to attack, I jumped out and onto the brute's back, hanging on with one arm and sliding a dagger between the bones of its neck with the other. It collapsed, twitching, but didn't die - its mouth gaped as it gnashed its teeth at us, and, shuddering, we stepped around it and into the hallway.

"We should try to get into the main hall," Alistair murmured softly to me. "The stairs to the Arl's personal rooms are in there, and we have to try to get to him and make sure he's all right."

I agreed, but when I tested the service entrance from the kitchens, I found it was barricaded from within. Stepping away quickly and hoping I had not just alerted everyone inside to our presence, I looked to Alistair for directions and he motioned for us to follow a servants' passage that circumnavigated the castle.

For some time, we encountered only a few undead inhabitants at a time, which Alistair dispatched easily. The occasional freshly-killed body on the floor gave us a start every time as we wondered whether it, too, would rise as we passed, but it seemed that the magic took time to work and anyone killed in the past day or so did not rise. Once, Alistair stopped and gazed for a long minute at the flaxen-haired body of a serving girl, and I wondered suddenly whether he recognized some of these people from his childhood. If he did, it only bolstered his determination, and his sword never hesitated.

Whenever possible, I scouted ahead to look for traps. A few doors had been trapped, but I was able to properly disarm these ones, which was worth it because they usually contained a terrified survivor who had locked themselves in for protection, all thirsty and close to despair as Jowan had been. We sent them back out via the path we'd cleared through the castle and the dungeons.

At the end of a particularly long corridor, while the others waited at its head, I came to a barred door and opened it. Inside, a bank of wooden cages lined one wall. Several cages held large Mabari hounds, but one of the cages had broken, the gnawed remains of its door hanging on the hinges. Its former occupant sat panting in the center of the room, watching me with pricked ears; he looked calm enough, so I ignored him. Only a few feet away from me lay a man's body, slumped with his dead hands still pressed to the slow gut wound that had claimed him probably only hours before. I stepped forward and reached out to search the corpse, and heard running feet behind me.

"No - don't!" Alistair yelled, and I turned, mouth open to ask a dumb question, when the hurtling dog struck me full in the chest, bowling me over and whacking my head against the wall, and the room exploded with barks and howls.

Stunned, my only reaction was to instinctively throw an arm up in front of my face. The hound's snapping jaws clamped on my arm and the dog worried it until, with a horrible tearing sound, I felt my shoulder dislocate. Then he shoved my useless arm out of his way and lunged for my throat.

Fangs pierced my flesh and for an instant, I knew the fear of every tiny prey animal, crouched shivering in the grass and breathing its last breath under descending jaws. Then a second shadow flew against my attacker - Rocky had arrived and the two dogs rolled in a snarling tangle of claws and teeth until they smashed into the far wall.

I clutched at my throat with my good hand. Every breath filled my lungs with more blood than air, and my vision swam, then darkened. I heard the tinkling sound of Morrigan's ice spell and the clank of Alistair's armored knees hitting the ground beside me.

"Hold on, 'Tisha, Maker's mercy, don't die," he begged. He rolled me onto my back and pressed his fingers, cool and tingling with healing magic, into the patchwork of rips and punctures that covered my throat.

I heard Rocky's whines as if from a long way off. Alistair was saying something else now but his voice came from too far away to hear. Then my ears shut down entirely, and there was only silence and darkness.

* * *

_Well, that's it! Hope you all enjoyed The Great Escape while it lasted. Go on, now, show's over._


	14. My Bad

The next thing I knew, someone was carrying me, and Rocky jumped along beside us, nudging me anxiously with his cold nose and whining.

"Stop it," I heard Alistair order sharply, his voice rumbling under my ear. "Don't bump into me while I'm carrying her."

Rocky kept crying, a heartbreaking sound, and I struggled to tell him I was all right, but no sound came from my mouth. Exhausted from the effort, I let go and knew only silence and darkness.

Then, I found myself hanging face-down over someone's knees while they pounded on my back. I coughed and choked, spitting out chunks of clotted blood in between whimpers of pain and lingering terror. When I finally breathed a clear breath, my tormentor laid me gently on the ground and I saw it was Mother Hannah. I blinked and breathed and tried to wake up while she examined my arm and shoulder, bending it this way and that. It didn't hurt like it should have; indeed, I had almost full range of motion and only a dull, throbbing ache. My throat felt on fire, but at least it wasn't full of holes anymore. The Mother finally released me.

"She'll be fine with rest and food," she said to someone standing behind me. Her voice sounded close to exhaustion. "Now, if you'll please let me go, I need to rest myself."

Alistair's worried face bent over me and I tried to smile. Then Rocky's enormous wet tongue embraced my cheek and I yelped.

"Thank the Maker you're still with me - _us_," Alistair said, voice vibrating with relief. "Morrigan ran and got Mother Hannah while I carried you out. The Mother used all her magic healing you. She said she had to make more blood for you. I guess that's hard?"

"What happened? Why did the dog go crazy on me?" I asked hoarsely, petting Rocky's muzzle to prevent him licking me again.

"That body on the floor was the kennel master, Odric. The poor hound was just trying to protect him," he answered sadly.

I felt guilty and stupid. "I'm sorry, I had no idea. Thank the Ancestors there was just the one dog."

"I don't want to even think about that," he shuddered. He helped me roll cautiously onto my side before trying to sit up. I felt light-headed and for a moment shadows crowded at the edge of my vision, and I dug my fingers into Rocky's fur for support.

"Where's Morrigan now?" I asked, looking around. We were sitting on the grass in front of the gently turning windmill. A young Redcliffe soldier stood guard at the hastily-erected gate that blocked to road to the castle.

"She's with Leliana at the inn," he replied. "She said something about making healing ointment. Oy, Siman! Do you think you could run over and grab us some sandwiches? I'll keep watch for you," he called to the young guard. The man nodded and trotted away, jingling. Alistair couched his shield and rather ostentatiously stood to attention in front of the gate, flourishing his sword to make me laugh. I giggled and he winked at me before making a 'fierce guardsman' face.

Eventually Siman returned with mutton sandwiches and water. I drank the entire flask of water, and found I really, really wanted the mutton and ate all of mine, then looked longingly at Alistair's until he pulled the meat out of his sandwich and handed it over. I scarfed that down, too, and sat and watched the windmill's graceful turning while Alistair ate. My head felt heavy again and I drooped without really thinking about it, ending up on his shoulder, where I rested for a little while before apparently I fell completely asleep because I found myself on his lap some hours later, judging by angled shadows falling across the grass.

"Finally you're awake, my leg fell asleep ages ago," he groaned and wriggled out from under me to stretch out with a sigh. I let my head fall to the grass and looked up at the clouds through the beautiful tree that stood near the windmill, fingering my sore shoulder and throat which really weren't that sore anymore, actually.

"What time is it, do you think?" I asked him.

"Probably around five," he replied, wincing as he massaged his tingling leg. "How are you feeling now?"

I sat up carefully but discovered the lightheaded feeling had gone. "Not bad. We should get going, and quickly - we can't afford to run out of daylight."

He nodded. "I'll go get Morrigan. You can stay here - there's no need for you to go up and down the hill."

"Can you bring back another sandwich?" I begged, and he flashed a quick grin before turning and jogging down the hill to the inn.

The two of them came back a few minutes later, and Morrigan carried a new crock of the healing ointment that we'd finally run out of. I opened it and examined it; it didn't look exactly like the other one and I squinted at her dubiously.

"It will work," she assured me. "Perhaps even better, for 'tis as fresh as can be."

We returned to the castle and found our way back to where we'd left off. Alistair insisted on stopping to feed the other dogs in the kennel, even though they snarled and threw themselves at their kennel doors when they saw us. We encountered no more resistance before finally working our way around to the front entrance to the Hall.

"Maybe we should go outside and let in the knights," Alistair suggested as we hesitated outside the great double doors.

"So Sir Swords-for-Brains can get them killed? No thanks," I shook my head.

"I agree," Morrigan chimed in. "We do not need more fools to worry about, getting in the way and flailing about with their mighty blades. One is bad enough." I shot her a hard look, but her eyes were mirthful and I decided this must be her idea of being friendly.

So we set ourselves outside the doors and shoved them open, braced for the worst. What we saw, though, shocked me to the bone.

"Go on! Dance!" A little blond-haired, blue-eyed boy of about seven commanded Bann Teagan, his piping voice hideously overlaid with the hoarse scream of the _other_. Whatever it was that spoke through this boy, its evil permeated the room and sucked the strength from my body and mind. The burden of leadership felt suddenly unbearable and I wanted desperately to just lie down and die, to be welcomed into its army and not have to _think_ anymore. Before us, Teagan danced jerkily, and the little boy laughed, his grin a rictus of terror.

My head bowed and I let my hands fall to my sides. Rocky looked up at me and whined, then leaped in front of me, taking charge of the situation. He bayed, and the entire room stopped and looked at him. The Arlessa, looking thoroughly broken, stood up and wrung her hands, and the little boy turned and clung to her, but the awful voice spoke in command to the blank-faced group of knights around him. As one, they couched their shields and raised their swords into a hanging guard. Behind them, Teagan continued his pitiful dance.

The child's fear poured through his link with the _other_ and the momentary loss of confidence loosened its grip on me. I shook my head dazedly, looked up in time to see Rocky and Alistair charge the six knights, and pelted after them. The knights stepped together with a neat clinking sound, interlocking their shields into a solid wall. Alistair tested its strength, throwing his weight behind his shield and colliding with the wall, but bounced off of their perfect phalanx and staggered. Rocky had better luck - he gathered himself and sprang up and over the wall, latching onto a knight's sword arm and bringing them both down to the ground, where he lunged at his throat. The remaining knights stepped in and filled the hole in their wall instantly.

These knights were not dead, or at least their bodies showed no sign of wounds, but their brains didn't seem to be working properly. They performed their combat maneuvers flawlessly, as thought on the training field, but seemed unable to react to anything unconventional. I noticed this when I ducked around that shield wall and got only a blank stare from the knight on that side. I struck at his face with a dagger, but he brought his shield around to block at the same time as Morrigan froze another knight - giving Alistair an opening, which he tried to use, but the last three men realized the wall had broken and lunged smoothly, throwing their weights behind their shields in three synchronized shield bashes that would have brought tears to the eyes of their drill sergeant.

Alistair went down flat on his back with a resounded crash of steel on stone, and rolled quickly to his right, covering himself as best he could while the three knights all brought their swords down in straight overhead swings. I got a real opening this time, three actually, as the trio all exposed their armpits at the same time in the same way. I grinned and looked forward to bragging at dinner as I plunged both daggers hilt-deep. I had to strain for height, though, and I missed the arteries I had wanted to cut, so I settled for wrenching the blades out at an angle and pulling all sorts of interesting stringy things out with them.

Both knights dropped their swords and screamed, both clutched at their shoulders, both suddenly looked around wild-eyed and fled. They ran in different directions, I realized; they must have freed themselves in their pain and fear.

Should have kept my eyes on my work, though; Knight #3 clocked me a good one on the side of the head with the pommel of his sword and down I went. I rolled sideways, twice, and bounced to my feet, but I needn't have bothered; Rocky had finished shredding his original opponent and charged. The knight who'd struck me was hurled face-first to the ground and Rocky jumped on him, pinning him down with his bodyweight and the weight of the poor man's armor.

Alistair had made it back to his feet after striking unexpectedly at the legs of the last knight standing, and without his comrades the man was no match for him; roles were reversed as the knight fell with blood streaming from a broken nose and struck his head hard on the stone floor, where he lay unconscious. Alistair turned to Rocky's pinned opponent and prepared a killing blow.

"Wait!" I shouted. "Hurt him, but don't kill him!"

Alistair shot be a brief questioning look, before shifting his focus to the man's sword arm. The armor protected his flesh, but the bone underneath snapped audibly. The knight gasped in pain, and suddenly cried out in terror and confusion.

"Let him go!" I ordered Rocky, and the frightened man scrambled to his feet and fled.

"No!" The little boy cried in his dual voice. "You're spoiling all my fun! Leave now! This land is _mine_!"

With a chill, I realized the child's voice had faded and he now spoke entirely with the hoarse shriek of the demon - for surely that's what it was, a possession by a demon of pride, the only kind powerful and aggressive enough to manage this much devastation.

"Please, Connor," Isolde begged, throwing herself at his feet. "Please, don't hurt anyone. Look at poor Teagan, your uncle!"

"I like him much better this way, ha ha! No more yelling!" The boy turned to Teagan with an imperious gesture, and the man stopped dancing and started turning somersaults. "He's my jester now. Mine! Nobody tells me what to do anymore, not even Daddy!"

The boy paused for a moment and scowled. "He's so boring now, though. He's not even dying. I could change that."

Isolde knelt, pleading with Connor to fight for control, to think of his beloved daddy. She caressed his face and kissed him, and the little boy blinked and shook himself before looking around at the blood and armed strangers. He quailed and covered his face. "No," he whimpered, his voice entirely his own. "What's going on? Where's Daddy?" And then he turned and ran, crying, up the stairs to the family chambers.

"Go get Jowan, please," I asked Morrigan. She nodded curtly and took off down the hall.

"Jowan?" Isolde snarled, turning on us. "He brought this demon upon us! If he had done his job, Connor would be safe!"

"Stupid woman, if _you_ had done _your_ job and thought about your son instead of yourself, you'd have sent him to the Circle where they could have protected him," I told her coldly.

She seemed to collapse in on herself, and looked almost as though she might faint. Bann Teagan, however, had stopped his capering when Connor left, and now he stood and helped her to a chair, looking in control of himself again.

"Thank goodness you are all right, Teagan," she whimpered. "I could never have forgiven myself if you died, not after I brought you here." He patted her hair soothingly.

I heard Morrigan and Jowan running down the hall and turned to greet them. Jowan hesitated when he saw Isolde and Teagan, but I gestured for him to come forward.

"Tell us our options, Jowan," I encouraged him. "What can we do about this demon? Can we do anything?"

He looked around at us uncertainly before speaking. "Well, the most straightforward thing would be to simply kill Connor," he began, and Isolde wailed pitifully. "But another option is for a mage to enter the Fade itself and confront the demon there."

Isolde looked up in sudden hope. "How is that possible?" she asked.

"We'd need more mages, and a lot of lyrium," he said, "neither of which we have. Or... I do know another way."

"Out with it, man," Teagan urged.

"I – you know I am an apostate. I was expelled from the Circle for practicing blood magic," he admitted.

This meant nothing to me, but I could tell from Alistair's horrified gasp and the way he instantly reached for his sword that it must be something pretty bad. Jowan cringed, and I laid a restraining hand on my zealous ex-Templar's sword arm.

"Blood magic is absolutely forbidden," he hissed at me through clenched teeth. "It uses the life force of the human body as power. It's evil!"

"Where would we get the mages and lyrium we need to do it the other way?" I asked him.

"We could go to the Circle," he replied promptly.

"That's almost two days away," Isolde protested. "We could all be dead by the time you make it back!"

I frowned and turned to Jowan. "How exactly would we do this blood magic?" I asked, ignoring Alistair's scowl.

"It would require a lot of someone's blood," he explained. "All of it, in fact."

"Are you saying we have to sacrifice someone for this?" I demanded.

"I'll do it," Isolde cried, coming to her feet. "I would gladly die for my son. It is no more than I deserve."

_You got that right, lady_, I said to myself. Personally, I would like nothing better than to let this harpy pay the ultimate price for her crimes, but I would be the first to admit my ignorance about magic and Alistair seemed to feel strongly that it was a bad idea.

"We will go to the Circle," I decided. Alistair relaxed and breathed a sigh of relief, but Isolde wailed again and covered her face in her hands.

"You will return too late," she wept, "and my Connor will surely die."

Teagan patter her shoulder comfortingly. "Have hope, Isolde, Connor is quiet now. The demon is weakened from losing so many of its minions, and we may be able to keep him confined to his rooms for some time, if necessary. I will fetch Ser Perth and his knights to protect him."

I turned away from the sad little family, an uncomfortable feeling that I had made the wrong decision lingering in my chest. "We leave at dawn," I muttered to Alistair and Morrigan on the way out. "I have to sleep tonight. I'm sorry, but after last night and then the dog, I'm going to pass out after dinner whether I like it or not."

Morrigan nodded her agreement. "I would have let the woman die, myself," she noted. "The Circle is full of pompous fools. They will likely refuse even to aid us."

"We'll use the treaty to force them," I told her, but inside I felt even worse. That possibility had not even occurred to me.

"Well, I think we're doing the right thing," Alistair said stoutly. "And you are going straight to bed, young lady. I'll bring dinner up." I glanced at him in surprise and saw worry painted all over his face under his badly-faked smile.

"I'm fine," I reassured him, squeezing his hand briefly. "Just tired. Mother Hannah said I would be, remember? Nothing to worry about." I glanced down at myself, then over at Rocky. "And I'm not going to bed until we've had a dip in that lake," I added. "Look at him – you can hardly tell he's got fur under all that gunk."

"You'll get cold," he protested. "I'll bathe him." Rocky whimpered.

"You'll bathe yourself," I ordered. "You smell awful, and the Ancestors only know what all _that_ stuff is." I pointed at some particularly unidentifiable purplish goop on his arm.

After some time spent splashing around and complaining about the cold water, while throwing a stick for Rocky so he could pretend he was playing and not bathing, we walked dripping uphill to the inn, where hot stew waited for us. I slurped it up gratefully and made my way to my room, managing to pull off my boots before flinging myself on the bed and passing out almost instantly.

In the wee hours of that morning, I awoke with my stomach rumbling. I lay in the dark, hoping it would go away, until I realized now I also had to pee. I padded barefoot down the hall to the latrine, then descended the stairs towards the kitchens, moving silently to avoid waking anyone else. But a flickering light from the kitchens told me at least one other person had come down before me.

I leaned my head in and saw Alistair sitting beside the stove, soaking up its lingering warmth and staring at the half-eaten apple in his hands like it contained the secrets of the universe. Something in the slump of his shoulders and the tightness around his eyes told me it wasn't just hunger keeping him awake. I thought guiltily about having snuck up on him and startled him in the castle, and turned and stomped loudly around in the dining room for a bit.

Sure enough, when I entered the kitchen he was sitting up and looking at the door, and had re-composed his features so he looked relaxed and happy. Liar.

"Morning," I murmured in that soft voice people use when they're up before dawn. Funny how I'd picked that sort of thing up already when just two weeks ago I'd never even seen a dawn. I pulled up a stool and dug around in the bushel basket of apples on the floor for a while before realizing I actually wanted jerky. I stood on the stool, straining to reach it where it hung from the rafters; Alistair nudged me out of the way before standing on the stool himself and easily plucking the jerky bundle from its hook for me.

"Thanks," I said, tearing off a bite.

"Did you have another nightmare?" he asked, seating himself again.

"No, I was just hungry," I mumbled around a mouthful of jerky.

"Don't they teach you not to talk with your mouth full in Orzammar?" he teased.

"Well now, aren't you fancy, Mr. Raised-by-an-Arl," I retorted.

"Did I say that?" he asked innocently. "I meant to say I was raised by dogs. Giant, slobbery dogs, a whole pack of them, from the Anderfels."

I nodded sagely. "That explains the smell."

He laughed. "Well, it wasn't until I was eight that I discovered you don't have to lick yourself clean. Old habits die hard, you know."

"That explains the breath, too," I noted, eyes twinkling. "But aren't you being a little hypocritical about the table manners, considering your history with the slobbering hounds?"

"Oh, no, the dogs had exquisite table manners," he said earnestly. "It was the Templars that corrupted me. You don't want to get between a Templar and a full larder."

"I'll keep that in mind," I said, then remembered something. "Speaking of larders, do all the new Wardens do this hunger thing?"

"Oh yes," he rolled his eyes. "And the older Wardens think it's sooo hilarious. After my Joining, when it was worst, I felt I'd go mad with hunger. I used to get up and ravage the pantry in the night. One dinner, I looked up from my third plate of food with my face all covered in gravy, and every Warden in the hall was staring at me, and we all just laughed and laughed."

I watched his eyes go soft with reminiscence and felt a stab of envy. "Sounds like you were one of the boys," I said a bit wistfully. "I wish I could have met them all."

"Well, I don't," he said in mock-seriousness. "As it is, you don't know any better, so you think I'm this mighty warrior. I'd like to keep it that way."

"Will you lock me in a tower and keep me all to yourself, my Prince?" I teased. Oh, Stone take me, was I flirting? I was. Time to go. I stood up, toed the stool back against the wall, and turned to leave.

"Absolutely I will," he said from behind me, also standing. "Where do you think you're going? The tower's this way." And he bent, scooped me up, and threw me over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes. I squealed and clung to the back of his tunic.

"Ye gods, you weigh nothing," he noted, stomping around the kitchen and ignoring my struggles. "I thought dwarfs were supposed to be all thick and muscle-y."

"Yeah, well, so's your mom," I snapped.

"That's not going to win 'Comeback of the Year,' you know," he pointed out, parading around the dining room now.

"I _will_ tickle you," I threatened.

"I wouldn't," he warned. "I'm really ticklish, and I'd hate to drop you."

I considered this, and decided the risk was worth it. I yanked up the back of his tunic and attacked his ribs, and he yelped and dropped me head-first down his back. Wow, he wasn't kidding about being ticklish. I rolled smoothly and hopped back to my feet.

"Maker, I'm so sorry," he said, aghast. "Are you all right?"

I punched the air triumphantly. "For Freedom!" I cried, and turned and ran. He gave chase and we stampeded up the stairs and down the hall, where I ducked into my room and slammed the door.

He knocked. "Seriously, are you OK?"

"You'll never capture me, vile tyrant! Avast!" I yelled through the door, and he laughed.

"_Will_ you shut _up_!" Morrigan hollered from her room, and we snorted with suppressed mirth.

"Go to bed," I ordered Alistair in a stage whisper. "I'll see you at breakfast."

"Sleep well." I heard the door close on his room and silence returned to the inn.

* * *

_Man, that elfroot is good shit, huh? I wonder if I can roll it up and smoke it..._

_A note to everyone who's got this story on Story Alerts: I'm going to break all my earlier chapters up into smaller chunks because people are complaining that they are too long and hard to read. So you will get lots of emails saying there's new content, when actually it's the same content broken into more chapters. _

_I'm really sorry about this, and I wish there was some other way to do it, but if there is, I haven't been able to figure it out. You can safely ignore all the emails up until the chapter titled "There And Back Again," which I intend to post on May 18th._

_In other news: Anon, I would've answered your question personally but you were anonymous, so here you go: No, I didn't forget Sten. I accidentally edited him out of the final version of the chapter - oops. I've added him back in now. He was never going to be joining the party, though, so you don't have to go back looking for him unless you feel like it. Sorry to all the Sten lovers, but sometimes roleplaying means things turn out oddly! _

_And finally, thank you to everyone who has read and reviewed and favorited, especially mille libri, who is full of advice and has written some awesome stuff. Seriously, go check it out._


	15. There and Back Again

At dawn the following morning, we packed our bags and ate a hurried breakfast before returning to the castle to check on Connor and Teagan. The boy had stayed hidden in his room, and apparently played with his toys for a while before putting himself to bed. He'd cried in his sleep, though, and the demon obviously fought him for control.

The remaining Mabari hounds had been released from the kennels and lay basking themselves in the sun in the castle courtyard, watching us intently as we passed. I remembered something I'd wanted to ask, and tugged on Alistair's arm.

"Can we go poke around in the kennels and see if there's any books on Mabari?" I asked. "Yesterday made me realize there's a lot I don't understand about them, and now I'm worried I'm not taking good care of Rocky."

He looked a little surprised. "You read books?"

I scowled at him. "Of course I do," I snapped. "I wouldn't be dwarva if I couldn't read, you clod. Don't ever ask me that again."

He threw up his hands in appeasement."I didn't mean anything by it," he backpedaled hastily. "I mean, obviously you can read signs and things, I just didn't know you'd read _books_. You're always saying Dust Town is so poor."

"All dwarves read the Memories as recorded by the Shaper," I said with dignity. "It is the heritage of our ancestors. We have only the deepest respect for the written word."

I glossed over the fact that many dusters actually rejected the Shaper's works, saying the memories contained nothing from the casteless and were just another way of controlling us. They had a point - I had had personal experience with the bias of the Shaperate - but my family was one of those who still revered our written legacy. The Shaper had always been kind to me, or as kind as anyone ever was to gutter trash. With one notable exception that I try not to dwell on.

"Oh, I... didn't know that," he said lamely.

"Obviously," I sniffed.

A quick search of the kennels revealed a box of Mabari Crunch, which was a sort of cookie that Morrigan told me contained elfroot, and a sturdy leather-bound manual titled "Mabari Mania: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Mabari But Were Afraid To Ask." The road we took from the Arldom followed the ridgeline around the lake, and its paving stones were wide and flat and well-maintained, so I paged through the book as we walked. It was a little heavy on illustrations and lacking in detail, but it was better than nothing.

We pushed hard all day, the fear that I had made the wrong choice and doomed the Arldom driving us. As night settled over the road, we turned off onto a game trail and camped in a clearing concealed behind a blackberry thicket, the brambles heavy with immature berries. Our camp-making had begun to settle into a routine, Alistair digging a firepit while Rocky and I gathered wood in the dark, Leliana preparing the cooking supplies for dinner and cleaning heating rocks, Morrigan disappearing to do the Ancestors knew what in her den-like shelter.

We ate boiled jerky and rolls from the inn and assigned the usual watch schedule. As Alistair settled himself in for his watch, I shook out my cloak, curled up in a tight ball under it, and summoned Rocky over to keep me warm. After a lot of shifting around, we both fell asleep.

Much later, judging by the state of the fire, I woke up shivering. The breeze had picked up and now blew cold and damp off the lake. Rocky had gone off somewhere, probably to patrol; the Mabari book had had a whole chapter about territorial dominance, and the process seemed to involve far too much urine for my taste. I looked around; Leliana sat with her back to me, facing away from the fire to preserve her night vision (I made a mental note to compliment her on her good thinking), and Alistair lay slightly curled with his head on his arm a few feet away, deeply asleep. Rocky was nowhere in sight.

I shivered again and lay there feeling sorry for myself until it occurred to me that, if I was very sneaky, I could probably lie down in the curve of Alistair's body and warm up without him even noticing. Then, when Rocky came back, I could sneak away again and he'd be none the wiser. I gathered up my cloak, crept silently across the intervening ground and settled myself with extreme care so I just barely touched him.

He smelled like steel and leather and campfire smoke, and I fit perfectly, curled into the space along his body between his elbow and knees. I waited for a while for Rocky to come back, but as Alistair's warmth seeped gently through our clothes, I drifted asleep.

* * *

"_What the -"_

Alistair's cry of alarm jerked me awake and I was up in a crouch before I'd even opened my eyes. I looked around and saw him standing several feet away and looking appalled. "Maker's breath, Latitia! You scared the daylights out of me!"

I sat down abruptly, the surge of adrenaline from the shock he'd given me setting my hands shaking.

He raked a hand through his hair, obviously badly shaken. "I'm not your personal hot water bottle! You have to at least _ask_! What kind of woman just assumes she's welcome in a man's bed!" Then his mouth snapped shut, as if he just realized what he'd said, and he groaned and turned away, rubbing his tired eyes.

Leliana was rapt. I saw her and my stomach twisted with shame that he'd shouted at me right in front of her. Between the embarrassment, guilt about upsetting Alistair, and having been shaken from deep sleep by someone I thought was my best friend only so he could yell at me, I felt absolutely wretched.

"I was cold," I whined, embarrassment now compounding as tears threatened, "I didn't think it'd be such a big deal - I thought we were friends!"

He turned and gave me a blank stare, totally nonplussed. I blinked uncertainly, and saw to my tremendous relief that Rocky had heard raised voices and come galloping back to camp.

"Where have you been!" I scolded, seizing the distraction. He whined and hung his head, and I immediately felt guilty about that, too.

To my utter surprise, Morrigan's voice came from the thicket. "Will you get over yourself and let civilized people sleep?" she demanded. "Foolish _man_, did it not occur to you that, with an entire race confined to a single city, separate beds might be a _luxury_ rather than a right?"

I turned and shuffled out of the firelight, dragging Rocky along by the collar. I was grateful to Morrigan - the most unlikely rescuer - but my dignity was beyond recovery at this point.

I found a patch of moss and laid my cloak out on it, sitting cross-legged and stroking Rocky's blunt muzzle, playing with the soft fur on his jowls. "I'm sorry," I whispered to him. He licked my fingers, at first being affectionate but then discovering the memory of beef jerky under my fingernails.

After a while I heard someone crashing around in the undergrowth, muttering curses under his breath. "We're over here," I sighed, and Alistair emerged from where he had snagged himself on a bramble. He sat on the edge of my cloak and petted Rocky for a few minutes in silence.

"I'm sorry," I said again, to Alistair this time. "I think I knew that would make you angry, but I was too sleepy and stupid."

"I'm not angry," he assured me. "I'm sorry, too. I'd just woken up from a particularly exciting nightmare and when I moved and there was someone there, I panicked. I shouldn't have said - _that_. Especially not after what you told me about your family. And it really doesn't say anything good about me that _Morrigan_ was the one being sensitive."

"I don't think she's even ever been to Orzammar," I noted. "She's pretty smart when she's not being frigid, no pun intended." He laughed, and I continued. "She's right that personal space is a major luxury item, and not just for sleeping. My place was like a game of musical chairs - no one wanted to sleep next to my mother so it was always a race to see which two would get the other bed. When she was _really_ drunk we'd all three pile onto one bed."

"Wait, _three_?" he interrupted. "I thought you had just the one sister."

"I do, but Leske also lived with us most of the time," I explained.

"I thought Leske was a man."

"Yeah."

He held up a hand to stop me. "Right, got it."

"No, it's not like that," I protested. "He stopped going home because his father used to break his arms, and Rica said he could stay with us instead. He was like our brother." Then, hoping to change the subject, I asked, "Do you want to talk about the nightmare?"

"Nothing new or interesting. Darkspawn, scary, bad. The usual." He gave me a wry smile.

I sat in silence, absently massaging the pads of Rocky's massive paws, and tried to decide if and how to say what I wanted to say. Finally I gave up and went for it, hoping the thought would complete itself on the way out. "I'm used to being good at people. But up here, things are subtly different, and I find myself making assumptions that turn out wrong, especially with you."

I paused, then forged on. "I know we haven't known each other for very long, but we've been partners, working and fighting and living together, and I _feel_ like you're my best friend. Is that another assumption?"

"No," he said softly, looking up at the lowering sky, his expression conflicted.

When he was quiet for too long, I asked, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," he replied hastily. "I was thinking."

"It can be scary the first time," I teased, patting his hand reassuringly.

"Ha, ha, very funny. I'll have you know, I've thought _at least_ twice in my life." He hesitated, blushing in the dark. "Uhm... I didn't mean to push you away. Before. You can – I mean, don't take this the wrong way, but you can sleep next to me if you want. If you're cold."

"How gracious," I murmured, then took pity on him as his blush deepened. "No, I know what you meant. Thank you, but I'm not going back to sleep tonight. I'm going to relieve Leliana and just start my watch now."

As we stood up and I threw my cloak around my shoulders, he mused, "You know, this explains why you wanted to sleep on my lap that time. And why you kept coming into my room at the Redcliffe Inn and climbing up on my bed."

"Was that really bad?" I asked nervously. "I thought you were just shy."

"No, it's fine, but I wouldn't do it with just anyone," he warned. "Murdock, for one, would probably object." I laughed, and sent him and Leliana to bed, settling in to watch.

Only a few minutes later, though, a fork of lightning seared my nighttime eyes, quickly followed by sheets of torrential rain, blown about by the gusty wind. I squawked and jerked my hood up, clutching it tightly below my chin as cold droplets tried to slip under my collar. Alistair and Leliana both grumbled and tried to roll themselves up better, but within minutes, the hollow in which we'd bedded down lay in a half-inch of water.

"Isn't this lovely," Morrigan's dry voice came out of the tempest behind me. "I just adore Ferelden's weather, do you not?"

"I do," I agreed. "Nothing starts the day off right like being soaked to the skin."

"Perhaps we should simply continue on to the Tower," she suggested. The coals sizzled and turned black, sending up a cloud of smoke that was beaten into the ground immediately.

"I'm certainly not going to sleep any more," Alistair joined in, sitting up and tightening the drawstring of his hood.

"The road is good," I said. "We could travel almost as fast as during the day."

And with that, we shouldered our packs and strode off, the wind whipping rain against our faces and pulling fiercely at our cloaks. As usual, Morrigan wore no protective clothing whatsoever, and steam rose off her body. I resolved to get an explanation of this some time when I could hear myself think.

The wind blew itself out around dawn, but the rain persisted, settling into a steady, drenching kind of rain that soaked from the bottoms of my trousers up to my knees and penetrated my worn boots, treating me to a repeat of the Korcari Wilds Wet Feet Experience. About an hour after dawn, we passed an abandoned farmstead and huddled under its drooping porch for a meal. Alistair pulled up some old, dry timbers from the porch floor and built a quite nice fire, and we were slicing the rolls open for cheese sandwiches when he suddenly grinned broadly.

"I'm gonna show you something cool," he told me, and took a completed sandwich out of my hands. He laid his steel shield over the edge of the fire and placed the sandwich on it. I watched intently but nothing seemed to happen. After a while, the edges of the bread turned golden and he flipped it over in his gauntleted hand.

"You know, we do have toast in Orzammar," I informed him with a raised eyebrow.

"Yeah but you said you'd never had cheese," he reminded me.

"So?"

He grinned again and picked up the toasted sandwich, peeling it open to show me the state of the cheese inside. It had melted, and its golden color and molten texture reminded me perfectly of the lava flows of home.

"Ooooh," I breathed, snatching it from him and stuffing half of it in my mouth. The melted cheese and toasted bread combined into a perfect union of deliciousness, and I moaned.

"Should I turn my back? Am I witnessing something indecent?" Morrigan asked sarcastically, and Leliana giggled. Alistair watched with glittering eyes. Rocky drooled.

When we rounded the next peninsula of the crinkle-edged lake, a soaring tower mounted on a rocky outcropping about a quarter-mile offshore rose into view. The tower's white stone walls bore the patina of many years of weather, in addition to a myriad of scorch marks, strange stains, and deeply-etched warding runes, and large sections of the walls appeared to have been replaced entirely after some catastrophic event had blown them open.

"Behold, the thinnest point in the entire Veil. Ladies and gentlemen, if you want demons, here's where you get 'em," Alistair declaimed in a theatrical voice, gesturing broadly at the tower.

"Really?" I asked, shrinking away from the tower until I bumped into him and jumped, embarrassed.

"Well, I'm exaggerating a little, but you know mages attract demons, that's why we're here," Alistair clarified. "The Veil, which keeps the demons and the Fade separate from waking reality, is weakened by the presence of mages and the practice of magic, and the Circle Tower has been the site of major tears more than once. The Templars help to control that."

"Did you come here to train?" I asked curiously.

"We had a few field trips, to meet senior Templars and hear some horror stories – to strengthen our resolve, you understand. But mostly we trained in the Denerim Chantry."

"Save those horror stories for the campfire tonight," I suggested. "Give the Archdemon some new material for me."

He laughed, and we turned left onto a narrower road that tracked back and forth through a series of hairpin turns down to a tiny dock and a large inn. The inn's windows shone with firelight and I thought longingly about soft, warm beds. A stables adjoined the inn via a covered walkway, and a few employees loitered around a fire in a steel barrel, eying us with idle curiosity.

"Oh, Maker, it's Carroll," Alistair groaned when he saw the man standing at the end of the docks. I looked up at him questioningly, but the man on the docks saw him, too, and hailed us.

"Well, if it isn't Mr. Smarty-Pants," the young Templar greeted Alistair with edgy cheer. "Back for more? Don't you know we've got scary mages in here? Or did you finally sass the Mother Superior so badly she sent you to wash _our_ dishes, too?"

I met Alistair's eyes and gestured with my head towards Morrigan, mouthing "scarier," and we sniggered before he turned to respond to Carroll.

"I'm afraid I'm not here to help you with your dish problem, Carroll, you'll have to settle for washing them yourself. Or did you break so many, they won't let you do even that anymore? Stuck out here on the docks, are you?" Alistair's voice also held an odd edge inside the hearty cheer, and I wondered what the history was here.

"We need to get to the Tower," I cut in, before the macho posturing could degenerate into arm-wrestling. "Is there a fee or something?"

"Nope, no fee," Carroll said happily. "I just don't let you go."

"What?"

"Nobody goes in or out right now. Some weird mage thing going on in there," he explained. "So, you just get to enjoy the view. Enjoy! Now go away."

I frowned. "I have this treaty, here, from the Gray Wardens that I have to show to your boss," I told him firmly, folding my arms.

"Oh, a Grey Warden treaty!" Carroll cried in mock delight. "So you're supposed to be one of those. Well, I've got some papers too! They say I'm the Queen of Antiva! What do you have to say to that?"

"Aren't Queens female?" I asked.

"Don't question royalty!" he snapped.

"We're not leaving," I insisted. "You don't understand, we have to speak to the Circle. There's a Blight, don't you know that?"

"No! I've one job, and one job only, and by the Maker's shiny gold cutlery, I will do it!" Carroll's eyes were a little too bright, almost hysterical.

"Look, can't we work something out," I begged, getting desperate.

He looked thoughtfully over my shoulder at Morrigan and her ridiculous robes. "That dark-eyed temptress over there – surely the Tower would be far too dull for her. You could just leave her with me. I'll take _good_ care of her."

"Oh, excellent!" Morrigan actually clapped her hands. "I've been wanting new prey."

"Wait, prey?" Carroll looked a bit less sure of himself.

"Latitia, you had better make yourself familiar with the boat. We will have to row ourselves; this lad will not be in any condition to row when I am done with him," she informed me. Carroll looked a little more hopeful, until she added, "He will no longer have the use of his limbs. Or his eyes, I think."

"Ah, on second thought, why don't we just - " Carroll began.

"Wonderful! I can smell his terror," she exclaimed gleefully. "Oh, that will make the loving all the sweeter."

Carroll blanched, turned, ran down the dock and jumped into the boat, almost sinking it with his heavily armored body. "What are we waiting for?" he called urgently. "Let's go to the Tower!"

The little ferry sculled slowly across the lake, following the pilings of what had once been a lovely bridge but had fallen – or been deliberately destroyed, I suspected. The rain set the lake's surface rippling, and it reflected the gray sky like molten lead. I gazed idly over the edge of the boat, eventually leaning over a bit to let my fingers trail in the water.

"I wouldn't," Carroll warned. "There's an awful lot of weird stuff in that lake. Some of it glows. You know what I mean. Nothing good can come of a glowing fish." I sat up quickly and kept all my limbs inside the boat for the remainder of the trip.

We climbed a flight of stairs to the foot of the tower and pushed open the massive doors, covered in protective containment wards, only to see a depressingly familiar scene. Templars scurried around like bugs under a rock, wounded men lay on cots, and a harried-looking commander shouted orders haphazardly as his men ran past.

"And I want those doors guarded at all times," the imposing senior Templar concluded, pointing towards a set of doors at the far end of the hall, identical to the ones we'd just entered through but about half the size. Then he turned to us.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded. "I gave Carroll express orders not to let anyone in."

I glanced up at Alistair to see if he wanted to talk to this guy, templar-to-templar, but no – he was already looking at me expectantly.

"We are Gray Wardens and have come to request aid from the mages in coping with the Blight," I informed him, trying to look more impressive than I felt, with my tiny voice and cheap leathers in front of this towering, steel-clad, iron-haired Templar knight.

The commander shook his head in irritation. "I grow weary of the Gray Wardens and their ceaseless need for men to fight the darkspawn!"

"Excuse me?" I interrupted with some heat. "You grow weary of our _ceaseless need_? Has it not occurred to you that the reason we need more men is because our own warriors have just laid down their lives to protect you and every other man, woman and child in Ferelden?"

The man looked briefly taken aback, but then his natural arrogance – although I suppose in a commander this is called 'confidence' – took over again. "Look around you. Do you not see that we, ourselves, have been laying our own lives down to contain an equal danger?"

He gestured towards the doors he had ordered guarded. "Behind those doors, abominations and demons stalk the halls. Maleficarum have torn open the Veil. The Circle is lost. The Tower has fallen."

Alistair and I shared a horrified look.

"How could this happen?" I demanded. "Isn't _preventing_ this what the Templars are for?"

"My men did what they could, but it wasn't enough. We were prepared for a few abominations, but not the veritable army of them that poured through the tower not two days ago. We had no choice but to retreat and seal everything inside. It's all we can do to contain them until reinforcements arrive," the knight explained, his shoulders slumping a little in discouragement.

"The mages and Templars are hardly defenseless," Alistair pointed out. "Some may still be alive in there. Shouldn't we at least look?"

"No!" The knight shook his head with sudden vehemence, and I was surprised to see tears briefly glitter in his eyes. Perhaps the man had cared more than I thought about the lives of his charges. "No one could survive that. And it is too painful to hope for survivors and find... nothing."

After a moment, he recovered his poise and continued. "I have sent for the Rite of Annulment and reinforcements from Denerim. When they arrive, we will destroy the entire Tower and everything in it."

"What?" I exclaimed.

"All abominations must be destroyed at all costs," Alistair declared firmly, folding his arms. I frowned at him and wondered if he'd been made to memorize that line and parrot it back, during his time in training.

"Look, sir - " I trailed off.

"Ser Greagior," he prompted.

"Look, Ser Greagior, can't we think of something? Couldn't we make a sweep of the halls and confront the abominations one at a time, clear the Tower out and look for survivors?" I used my most reasonable tone. "The remaining mages could be tried and questioned by the Circle once the abominations are gone, right?"

He scowled at me for a moment, then sighed. "If you wish to commit suicide, that is your decision. But if you go inside, I'm not letting you back out, not without some proof that you have neutralized the threat. If... if you could find the First Enchanter, Irving, he is a good man; I would trust his word. If anyone could survive in there, he would."

"We need to discuss this, please," I told him, then led my little group back outside.

"Foolish mages," Morrigan burst out. "They throw away their freedom for the promise of safety, and look where it gets them!"

"It is highly ironic that we came here looking for help with a possessed mage and found this," I agreed with a sardonic smile. "Alistair, you're our abomination expert. What's your take?"

Alistair shook his head. "If the entire Templar force stationed in the tower couldn't handle it, then it's serious."

"I didn't like what he said about not letting us back out," I said. "What if we get in there, only to find we're in over our heads? And even if we _can_ handle it, we don't know if there'd be a surviving mage to bring back to Redcliffe once we're done. Greagior certainly thinks there aren't any."

"And we have no idea how long we'd be in there, fighting, while Redcliffe is waiting for us," he noted glumly.

"We could find ourselves trapped there during the Annulment, if this Irving is dead and the disgustingly self-righteous Greagoir refuses to release us without him," Morrigan said bitterly.

"If we're gone for too long, Connor's demon will attack again. I don't think we can afford to take this risk, not with the entire Arldom of Redcliffe waiting for us," I decided with some reluctance. "The Templars have this under control for now. Once we have secured Redcliffe's safety, we can come back and see what we can do to help them. We need the Circle, if there's anything left of it to salvage."

We all looked at one another, thinking miserably of the forced march to get here, and how now we were just going to turn around and march on back.

To my surprise, Leliana chimed in. I'd all but forgotten she was there. "Perhaps we could inquire at the inn about the horses," she suggested. "Possibly they are for hire?"

"We don't have any money," I said.

"We could requisition the beasts," Morrigan shrugged. "Let those treaties you carry around be of some use."

"We can't just take a civilian's horses," Alistair objected.

"We'd give them back when we come back to the Tower," I said, secretly thrilled at the prospect of getting to ride a horse. "Think how much faster we'd get to Redcliffe if we could ride!"

And with that, we left our promises with Greagior and piled into the ferry for the return trip. The rain had lightened to drizzle, and the white disc of the sun shone through the clouds on occasion, when we climbed out of the ferry on the mainland and trooped into the inn to inquire about transportation.

The surly innkeeper, who introduced his inn as "The Spoiled Princess," told us he didn't have any saddle horses, but he did have a small wagon that he used for traveling to the town for supplies and to sell his fish – it seemed he supplemented his living by selling the abnormally large local fish as a delicacy in nearby towns. To my surprise, he was willing to accept payment upon our return; apparently the word of a Gray Warden is still worth something.

And so we found ourselves trundling along in a small wagon behind two stocky reddish-brown horses with golden manes and tails. They were fresh and the wagon was all but empty, and if we rested them occasionally, we could probably let them walk all night while we took turns sleeping in the back.

I stayed in the front most of the time and listened to Leliana babble on about her white palfrey she'd had back in Orliesa. I did not ask her why she'd left it, or why she was here at all, figuring it wasn't my business, but instead relaxed and let her delicate voice wash over me. She drove the wagon all day, seeming to enjoy being valuable.

We decided to divide up sleeping shifts so that Leliana went with Morrigan and I went with Alistair, because Alistair also had horse experience, whereas Morrigan and I had none. Alistair and I slept first because he'd had the least sleep the previous night. We curled up in the wagon, with Rocky wedged between us, and its slow rocking on the smooth highway eventually lulled me to sleep.

I dreamed of demons, the accusing eyes of the dead, the wailing of mothers mourning their sons, and the shadowed and haggard face of Loghain's repentant weapon... _Jowan_.


	16. Connor's Demon

In the middle of the night, the wagon jerked me awake as it left the highway and bumped over some ruts to stop on the grass. Leliana had called a halt to rest the horses and change shifts. I slid out of the wagon's cargo area and jumped down from its tongue, leaving Alistair still asleep, and tapped Leliana on the shoulder to tell her I wanted to go look for some water. The thirsty horses had drunk everything in our flasks and they needed refilling.

I asked Rocky to scent out the nearest water, and lugged the giant cooking pot along with our regular flasks as I followed him. After ten minutes or so, we climbed down into a shallow ravine and found a bubbling brook rushing downhill towards the lake.

I filled our flasks and the pot, and stopped to wash my face and rinse some of the dust out of my hair. Then I bent to pick up the water and discovered to my chagrin that water is heavy, too heavy for me to carry the full pot by myself. I was standing there scratching my head when I heard crashing around in the underbrush nearby and looked up to see the glint of torchlight behind the line of shrubbery that bordered the ravine. I froze, looking for a place to hide, but then I heard his voice.

"Ha-ha, I found you!" Alistair crowed with delight before he could _possibly_ have seen me, in the dark, at the bottom of a ditch.

"How in Earth do you even know I'm down here? I know I didn't make any noise," I demanded, annoyed that I'd been so easy to track.

His grinning face came into view at the top of the ravine, and he began carefully picking his way down, his night-blinded eyes giving him trouble until I reached up to steady him.

"You're a real Gray Warden now," he told me, beaming like the sun.

"Huh?"

"So you know how Wardens can sense darkspawn? Through the link in the blood?" he asked, and I nodded. "Well, we can sense other Wardens the same way. Through the blood. Can you sense me?"

I frowned, confused, then shut my eyes experimentally. "Nope," I admitted.

"You will," he assured me, bending to pick up the full pot in one hand. I slung the flasks over my shoulder and we started back to the wagon.

"So what's go you so excited?" I asked. "You look like you just mined the Mother Lode."

He hesitated a moment before replying. "Before Ostagar, there were always dozens of Wardens around. And then they were all gone. I hadn't noticed how quiet and – and_ lonely _it was until I woke up just now and there you were," he explained, a little shy now.

"Oh." I furrowed my brow and tried again to sense him with something other than eyes and ears, but I still wasn't getting anything. At least, I didn't think so. "I hope I get it soon. That sounds kind of nice."

"It's how I always imagined a real family would feel," he mumbled. I glanced up at him sharply, but he clearly did not intend to elaborate. He didn't look sad, so I left it alone. After a while he started smiling to himself again.

"Darn, I shouldn't have told you yet," he said suddenly.

"Why not?" I asked, a little hurt.

"I should have gotten some mileage out of it while I can sense you and you can't sense me. I could beat you at Blind Man's Bluff, for instance, and you wouldn't know why. You'd just think I was that awesome."

"We'd make a killer Hide 'n' Seek team," I added.

He smacked his forehead. "We've been doing this wrong all along," he bemoaned. "Here we've been using it to fight the darkspawn and save all of mankind, when we could have been winning all kinds of trophies at the International Hide 'n' Seek Championship."

"You have a _championship_ for that?" I asked incredulously, but his quick grin gave it away and I laughed.

We drove the wagon the rest of the way to Redcliffe ourselves, stopping at dawn for another rest. At some point in the wee hours, Morrigan and Rocky disappeared for a while. Morrigan didn't volunteer any information, so I didn't ask, but I wondered if he'd followed her hunting.

Around mid-morning all four of us were awake at once, so I decided to stop beating around the bush and talk about what we were going to do with Connor.

"Morrigan, I think it'd be better to use Jowan to spare Connor. But that would require you to enter the Fade, and I'm not going to order you to do that against your will," I told her.

She shrugged. "'Tis an intriguing notion. I do not mind."

"Wait – you can't actually be considering working with that blood mage. We don't know if he is a maleficar or not, and anyway, it's totally forbidden," Alistair insisted.

"I'm not really clear on that," I confessed. "Can he be a blood mage and not a maleficar?"

"Maleficarum cause harm to others. It's the definition. I suppose a blood mage could technically not be maleficarum as long as he only ever uses his own blood for power," he explained. "Although most of the Chantry would disagree. All blood magic is forbidden, for any reason."

"Well, then even if he's not maleficarum now, he would be after this," I said.

"No he would not," Morrigan declared. "His victim is totally willing, even begging him to perform the rite."

"She has a point," I said to Alistair. "We would do her greater harm by refusing to let her make this sacrifice, and forcing her to live with the knowledge that she is responsible for the deaths of so many, including her own son."

"Isolde is the arl's wife! You're talking about killing his _wife_! With _blood magic!_" Alistair clenched his fists, obviously getting frustrated with the moral pontificating - and the distinct lack of a happy solution.

"And Connor is his son," I said gently. "If Isolde dies to save him, we can tell everyone she was a hero. Nobody needs to know what really happened, not even Eamon. We can spare him that heartache."

He put his head in his hands. "You want me to cooperate with blood magic, and then you want me to lie about it." He sat in silent thought for a long minute.

"If you tell me that using blood magic would be worse than killing a little boy, then I'll believe you," I told him quietly. "I'm relying on you to tell me these things. Remember, I have quite literally been living under a rock."

"Fine," he mumbled into his hands. "Someone is going to die either way, and it's better to save the child." He sat up and his face hardened. "But I'll be standing right behind that mage with my blade pointed at his heart. If he tries anything – anything at all – "

"I'll cut his throat after you run him through," I agreed.

Our wagon rattled down the hill to Redcliffe right before lunchtime, and we pulled up to the inn's stables to grab a quick lunch, where we ran into an old friend.

"Bodahn!" I called, waving to the man and his son as he unpacked trade goods from his own wagon. "Good to see you – no more trouble on the road?"

He turned and dropped his sack of flour to wave back. "No trouble, little lady. And you?"

I laughed then, wondering how I'd begin to explain about the walking dead and the demon without sending him running the other way. I invited him in to eat lunch with us, and gave him a quick rundown of the events of the past few days as we gulped down our stew.

Bodahn tapped his chin thoughtfully. "You know, we may not have had trouble on the road, but that was plain luck. We passed many an overturned wagon on the way here. Bandits and desperate folk, in addition to the usual beasties and even darkspawn raiders."

I frowned as I stood up and put on my hat, meal finished. "That's going to do some serious harm to the Ferelden economy, if the wagons can't ride."

He nodded. "I'm beginning to think that, no matter how winding your travels may be, we're safest if we follow you. You and your friends are formidable folk indeed – good to have on the road."

I glanced at Alistair, who shrugged, before replying. "Well, there's bound to be times when we have to separate temporarily, but I suppose there's no reason why you can't follow us. Honestly, your wagon will be a boon; I wasn't looking forward to lugging tents on my back."

"It's a deal, then!" Bodahn declared, offering me his fists. "You let us under your wing, and we carry your gear."

I hammered his fists, feeling a pleasurable wave of nostalgia. "Deal." Waving our farewells, we left Leliana to check into the inn with our gear and take care of the horses, and climbed the hill to the castle bridge.

We found Teagan with the knights at the base of the stairs below the family rooms. He greeted us warmly, clasping my hands and hugging Alistair, telling us Connor had tried to escape once and been driven back. He had then erected some sort of barrier at the top of the stairs and apparently was licking his metaphorical wounds.

I gathered Teagan together with Isolde, whose grief had run itself through and who now lived in the place beyond pain, to give them the bad news: That no help was coming from the Circle, and that we had decided to take Jowan up on his offer. Isolde let out a little sob of relief that her son would be spared, and kissed my hand gratefully before I could stop her. Teagan's face remained impassive, and I knew that, for him, there was no good outcome to this scenario.

Isolde begged to perform the ritual as soon as possible, so I went to fetch Jowan. To my dismay, he had been put back in his dungeon cell. I checked him over, but he showed no other signs of being mistreated, so I let it go for now.

"What do you need?" I asked him.

"I will need to lay out the ritual circle, and to do that I'll need a knife and five candles," he replied, rolling up his sleeves to bare arms covered in scars. I thought about what Alistair said, about how blood mages could use their own blood instead of that of a victim, and wondered if the scars were evidence that he wasn't a maleficar after all. "We'll also want a bed or couch, for Morrigan. No need for her to lie on the stone floor," he added, smiling a little.

We gathered his materials and watched nervously as he drew the mystic circle in his own blood. Alistair was hovering over him, his sword drawn, and I noticed the mage wincing as if his presence hurt physically. I thought maybe he was doing some Templar thing by accident, and tugged him back a step; we couldn't afford for Jowan to be exhausted before the ritual had even begun.

Finally, Jowan informed us that the time had come. Teagan held Isolde close for a moment, tears glittering in his eyes, but Isolde's face was perfectly at peace, and she walked steadily into the center of the circle.

"Don't we need Connor?" I asked, but Jowan shook his head.

"He's close enough," he said shortly, concentrating on adding a few finishing touches and arranging his candles around Isolde. Then he gestured for Morrigan to lie on the couch we'd dragged next to the circle, and began his incantation.

I couldn't understand the words, but his voice swelled and took on a sonorous reverberation below the level ears could hear, so I felt his words vibrating in my own chest. Isolde trembled violently, then snapped rigid, face upturned and arms outstretched.

The spell culminated as Jowan thrust both fists in the air, screaming a final word that shot out from him in a physical wave, stirring up dust and extinguishing the candles. When the wave hit Isolde, she too screamed. A fine red mist burst out from her, and I realized with horror that her blood had just been jerked through her very skin. An instant later and it was over; Isolde collapsed bonelessly to the floor, her skin ashen and hollow. Her blood flamed blue and burned away.

I turned quickly to Morrigan, but she lay relaxed on the couch, looking for all the world as though she merely slept. I bent over her and saw her eyes move rapidly under her lids, and knew with a shudder that, somewhere, she was confronting a demon.

Then I looked to Jowan, and saw he had slumped to his knees on the floor, blood dripping from open wounds on his wrists and forearms. True to his word, Alistair stood over him, sword in hand and tears pouring down his face. I wanted to tend Jowan's wounds, but feared that if I showed kindness to Isolde's killer now, Alistair would never forgive me.

We waited.

Morrigan gasped and shuddered, and I jumped to her side, watching fearfully as burn blisters rose along her arm. The demon must have attacked her with fire, as she fought it in the Fade. I fumbled for the healing salve she'd made and massaged it gently across her blackened arm, then along her cheek and her shoulder, as more burns formed.

"She's losing, isn't she?" Alistair fretted, and I saw to my relief that he'd finally left poor Jowan alone.

"We don't know that," I said, defiantly jerking off her knee-high boots and confirming that the smell of burning flesh was coming from her left leg. I smeared it with ointment, then muttered a quick prayer to the Paragon of medicine as the burn spread, and gestured for Alistair to turn his back as I hiked up her skirt, spreading ointment along her thigh.

Morrigan gasped again, and her eyes flew open. Then she slapped me across the face.

"Don't touch me!" she shrieked, trying to jump to her feet and losing her balance. I reached out to catch her and set her back on the couch, and got an elbow in the ribs for my efforts. I held up my hands and stepped back, and she sat, breathing heavily, for several minutes, before we head a quiet knock on the door to the family rooms.

"Mama?" called Connor's sweet, little-boy voice.

Alistair grabbed my arm. "Maker's mercy, what are we going to tell him?"

"Don't let him see this," I ordered Teagan. "Go to him and keep him upstairs until we can clean up."

Teagan nodded and ran up the stairs, calling, "Uncle T's coming, kiddo! You wait right there!"

"Make yourselves useful," I snapped to the knights milling around at the foot of the stairs. "You – take this body and hide it in the basement for now. And you – bind Jowan's wounds, and take him to a guest room to rest. Not a dungeon, a real bed. You others, get mops and buckets and clean up this mess." They stood to attention and saluted crisply before running off, evidently glad someone was giving orders. I shivered a little, wondering how a casteless had just thrown commands at an entire group of knights and lived to tell the tale. Oh, how the world turns.

"Do you think I can go up?" Alistair asked anxiously. "I really want to see the arl." I nodded, and he took the stairs two at a time.

In the momentary quiet, I went and sat next to Morrigan on the couch, keeping several feet or air between us just in case. Her breathing had steadied, and the burns were already fading.

"Will you be all right?" I asked.

"I'm fine," she said crisply, and stood, brushing herself off. "As long as you keep your overly-familiar hands off me, that is."

"I'm sorry about that, but I was putting salve on your burns," I pointed out, trying not to sound defensive. "Would you rather I hadn't?"

She sighed. "No, I suppose not. You gave me quite a turn, however. A woman might wonder what else had been going on while she lay helpless." She cast a glare in Alistair's direction.

"He would never touch you, and I would never let it happen. You really went above and beyond the call of duty today," I told her seriously. "We're staying here tonight, so if you want to excuse yourself, go ahead. I want you to have rest and peace, and whatever else you need."

She nodded with evident relief, and strode quickly from the hall as the cleanup crew returned with their mops. I stood around feeling useless for a while, before deciding to invite myself upstairs.

Teagan and Alistair stood by the Arl's canopied bed, talking softly; Teagan was saying he would keep Jowan under house arrest until the Circle of Magi could deal with him. Connor sat on the floor playing with blocks a few feet away, as if nothing had happened. I approached on silent feet, and watched curiously as Alistair pushed the canopy's curtains aside and sat on the edge of the arl's bed.

I sat on the floor, near Connor, enjoying the rich carpeting, and looked around a bit. Now that we weren't fighting for our lives, I had time to be impressed by the castle. Its gray stones held streaks of red iron ore, and I noticed that many of them were dovetailed into each other, set without mortar, and wondered if the dwarves that had built the tunnel might have inspired its construction.

Its narrow, defensible windows had been decorated with brightly-colored curtains to soften their severity, and the furnishings had been constructed with an eye for comfort as well as style. Only the subtle touch of gold leaf, lusciously soft fabrics, and the occasional classy jewel told of the wealth of the house.

I liked this castle, I realized, and felt a little thrill of satisfaction that Isolde's poison was gone from it. Instantly ashamed of myself, I squashed the feeling, but still, the idea that Alistair could maybe come home now had taken hold, and I found myself watching him as a man in his own house, rather than a visitor.

He reached out to gently smooth Arl Eamon's long gray hair from his brow, which made me smile. He did fit nicely here, with his clean-cut good looks and sun-bronzed hair. He looked bigger than he was, I realized; he stood an inch shorter than Teagan, but his long limbs and expressive face gave him more presence, especially when combined with the confident bearing of a warrior.

He felt my gaze and turned to direct a quizzical look at me. I gave him a smile, which he returned with interest.

Meanwhile, Connor had been examining me carefully. "You're a dwarf," he announced.

"No I'm not," I told him with a straight face. "I'm just short for my height."

He considered this for awhile before informing me, "That's silly."

"I am silly sometimes," I admitted. "Shall we see how tall we can stack these blocks before they fall over?"

He nodded eagerly, and we began stacking blocks. The tower became more and more unstable on the soft carpet, until finally, with a great cry of delight from the builders, it fell with a clatter and hit the unsuspecting Alistair on the leg. He jumped, and I grinned at him before starting to gather the blocks in a pile again.

"You are _very_ silly," Connor said, giggling as we started stacking a new tower. "But did you know that you're awfully skinny for a dwarf? You should eat your vegetables so you grow up big."

"Tell you what," I bargained. "If you promise to eat yours, I'll promise to eat mine."

Teagan came and joined us, and I bid Connor goodbye for now. He was busy climbing into Teagan's lap and didn't really notice, so I figured it was a good time to leave and went into the hall to poke around a little, musing that the little boy acted as though he didn't even remember the demon. If that was true, then may the Ancestors be praised for their mercy.

I found my way into a study that looked like it was Eamon's, and discovered a curio cabinet on the rear wall filled with carved figurines of various mythical creatures and deities. _Aha_, I thought, _Hence Alistair's fascination with that little carving from Lothering_. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for more, and turned to look at the desk and its contents, tucking my hands under my arms to keep my sticky fingers under control.

But it was no use – draped over the desk's candelabra hung a medallion with Andraste's holy symbol on it, laced with cracks where it had been painstakingly glued together: An irresistible temptation. I reached out and picked it up, and was examining it when Alistair poked his head into the room.

"What are you doing?" he asked suspiciously. "That's the arl's stuff."

"This isn't the arl's," I told him, holding it out. "It's yours."

He stepped forward and took it, and his face filled with wonder. "This... this is my mother's amulet. You found it in here? But it was smashed..."

"It looks like Eamon fixed it for you. He must have meant to give it to you," I said, feeling extremely pleased with myself for finding it.

He looked at me suddenly. "You knew this was mine?"

"Well, I didn't _know_, but you told me you'd had an amulet with that symbol and that it had broken," I explained.

"And you remembered?" he asked incredulously. "Wow, I'm – I'm not used to people actually listening when I talk."

I frowned at him. Who hadn't listened to him? Surely Eamon listened... didn't he? Actually, come to think of it, he probably didn't. He certainly hadn't listened to Alistair when he said he was miserable at the Chantry. The arl's good standing in my eyes took a big hit.

I didn't say that, of course. What I said was, "Of course I listen to you. You're worth listening to."

He smiled, a little uncertainly, as if he didn't quite believe all this was happening. He fastened the amulet around his neck, tucking it safely under the collar of his tunic. Then he breathed a deep breath and relaxed, smiling again, his usual room-brightening grin this time.

"What do you say we get out of this armor?" he suggested. "I'm beginning to forget what plain clothing feels like."

"Yes! And a bath!" I bounced up and down on my toes. "Where is it? It's bath time! Let's go!"

He laughed at me and started to lead me through the castle before I remembered that I really ought to invite Leliana and Morrigan, and we trooped down the to inn; Rocky fell in behind us when he saw us pass through the courtyard, his Mabari playmates casting mournful glances after us for ruining their ball game.

"We'll be back, boys, don't worry," I called over my shoulder, grinning.

_As ever, my sincerest thanks to everyone who has reviewed, favorited, and even beta'd, especially Fluid Consciousness and mille libri!_


	17. Nobody Likes a Sober Dwarf

We collected Leliana and all of our stuff to bring up to the castle's guest rooms; Teagan had invited Alistair and us to stay in its more luxurious accommodations. Morrigan had disappeared and I hoped she was having a chance to relax, wherever she was. Lloyd was sorry to see us go, so I promised I'd come back for his special stew.

The castle guest rooms took up a whole wing. I dropped off my stuff, stripped out of my armor and boots, and padded barefoot down the hall looking for company in the baths and looking forward to the familiar social ritual. It wouldn't be like Orzammar's baths, of course, but at least it would be warm, and hopefully less crowded and noisy.

I ran into Alistair first, who was hanging around looking lost. I wondered if he felt weird staying in the guest room. Had Connor taken his old room?

"Coming?" I asked him, hoping he would feel better after a nice soak.

"Where?" he asked.

"To the baths, duh," I gestured towards the spiral stairs leading to the basement.

"You can go first," he said. "I know you've been looking forward to hot water."

"First? I thought you said the bath here was communal," I asked in puzzlement.

He blushed. "Well, yes, but, there's just the one and..." He left it hanging.

"Isn't there a divider across the middle?" I still didn't get it, and apparently neither did he, because he just looked confused. Finally I thought I saw the source of the misunderstanding.

"When you said 'communal,' you actually meant 'shared,' didn't you?"

He blinked. "As opposed to...?"

"Dust Town has a great big bath the size of your dining hall," I explained, a note of pride creeping into my voice. "Everyone uses it together. It's very sanitary, it uses the lava flow and boils the water and then the changing temperature forces it through the pipes so there's no machinery to maintain. It's hundreds of years old and still works as well as the day it was made."

His mouth hung open, aghast. "And _everyone_ uses it? Even... men? At the _same time_?"

"Of course not, that's what the divider is for," I said. "Men use one side and women use the other."

"Oh, _Maker_," he groaned, putting a hand over his eyes. His blush had progressed through pink and red and was now in the blotchy stage. I felt better knowing I wasn't the only one whose skin did that. I patted his arm.

"Poor Chantry boy," I soothed. "It's OK, I'll bathe with Leliana." Surprisingly, this didn't seem to help.

I knocked on her door and she opened it after a moment's shuffle. "Oh! Latitia! What can I do for you?"

"I'm going to the bath. Wanna come with?"

Her eyes widened and her mouth formed a perfect O, and for an instant I thought I had done something horribly wrong – I understood Alistair's shyness, even if I thought he was being a prude, but it hadn't even occurred to me that human _women_ were shy, too. _Maybe I should have asked Rocky for company instead_, I thought ruefully.

"Yes!" She exclaimed. "Let me get a towel!"

OK, maybe not.

She scrambled through her unfamiliar room until she found a robe and came running out, flushed and smiling. I led her down the stairs Alistair had pointed out to me, passing him again as he loitered near the top, leaning on the wall with his arms folded and Rocky panting happily at his feet. I gave him a smile and hoped he would go somewhere and relax instead of hanging around in the hallway all day.

The tub would barely fit three people and I wondered how a whole castle could possibly get by with just this. Maybe only the noble family used it. And guests, of course. I stripped and folded my clothes on the slatted wooden bench while we waited for the tub to fill, steam rising in lazy spirals from the swirling water.

Longingly, I watched it pour until I could wait no longer and jumped in, wincing at first as the hot water stung the healing bruises and scrapes I'd picked up. I slid down until the water lapped at my chin, and it was amazing. Leliana joined me and for a while we just sat and soaked.

"So what are you going to wear tonight?" she asked eventually, sitting up to reach the soap.

"Huh? Clothes. Why?"

"You mean you don't know? The Bann is having a party tonight, for the whole town! He says we should celebrate Redcliffe's survival, and honor the ones we lost with joy instead of tears." Her eyes shone. "Bella told me. She and Lloyd and the castle girls are making a feast, and there's going to be music and dancing!"

Now I understood – of course a bard from the royal court of Orliesa would get excited about a chance to dress up and dance. I shook my head. "I don't have anything to wear but my traveling clothes."

"Oh, that won't do," she frowned. "Perhaps Bodahn has something you could wear. Something for a dwarf woman, I mean."

"It wouldn't fit," I shrugged. "Dwarf women's clothes always need to be taken in or I look like I'm wearing a tent." I traced the outline of a voluptuous woman in the air. "They're made for girls like _that_."

"You just leave it to me," she assured me. "I'll think of something. What about shoes?"

"I only wear boots," I said flatly. No heels or slippers for me. I wouldn't wear anything I couldn't run in.

"Oh," she faltered a little. "Well, your boots are not so bad, I suppose, if we put a long enough skirt on you."

"Skirt?" I groaned. "I don't really do skirts. You're thinking of my sister."

But she had already moved on to my hair, and reached out to brush it forward and make it fall over my face. I shook my head in irritation, but she was undeterred.

"I like how you wear your hair," she told me. "It's simple, but it suits you." Then she launched into a story about women wearing live birds in their hair back in Orlais and the associated hygiene problems. I was horrified and amused in equal measure, and when she asked if I minded her babbling, I said no, and to my surprise, I meant it.

Letting her prattle on was relaxing, a bit of a break from the exhausting effort it took to talk to, say, Morrigan. As long as she was telling me something funny, anyway, and not whining about how much life was better in Orlais or trying to out-fancy everyone in the room. And, as I arched back to wet my hair and our legs momentarily tangled up underwater, I decided it was also relaxing to be around someone who didn't blow a gasket if I touched them.

We lingered and chatted until the water cooled before returning to the guest wing. She linked her arm through mine and told me a joke about an Antivan whore, a Fereldan knight, and a Mabari, and we were giggling about it when we passed Alistair sitting cross-legged on the rug in his room, eyes closed and peaceful.

I let go of her and leaned into his room. "What are you doing?"

He jumped and opened his eyes. "A Templar thing."

Fine, be mysterious. I changed the subject. "Did you know there's a party?"

He nodded. "Teagan told me."

"Were you going to tell _me_ at some point?" I asked, annoyed. "Never mind. We're going to see Bodahn about clothes."

"What's wrong with what you're wearing?" he asked, and Leliana just about died of laughter before grabbing my arm again and dragging me off.

Bodahn did indeed have a dress, a dark ruby red one in linen, and it did indeed hang off me like a tent. Fortunately, it was one of the soft, drapey ones that had come into fashion a few months ago, caught at the shoulders and waist with cord, so all I really had to do was tighten the cords and at least it wouldn't fall off. Leliana fussed, saying it didn't show off my figure, to which I responded, "What figure?" That shut her up, until she started playing with my hair.

I got her off of my hair with minimal damage, only a small braid with a narrow red ribbon in it on one side of my face. Then she said something about makeup and I fled, leaving her to discuss shoes with Bella as she chopped vegetables.

A chilly breeze had begun blowing off the lake, which seemed to happen every night here around dusk. I got cold on the way over the bridge to the castle and stopped to pull my trousers on under the voluminous skirt and toss on my jacket.

Lanterns had been lit all along the bridge and in the castle courtyard, leading up to the front doors and on to the main hall. The hall itself buzzed with activity, and it seemed like everyone in the village had already arrived. The long tables had been laid with stacks of plates and flatware, but no food had come out yet, more's the pity. Musicians tested their instruments at the far end of the hall, unfamiliar ones with lots of strings.

I went looking for either Alistair or Rocky, and found them both in his room, on his bed, although Rocky was making a serious argument for sole occupancy, his huge paws splayed out and massive head laid across Alistair's belly, drooling copiously.

"Hey, you're wearing girl clothes," Alistair said, trying to sit up. Rocky grunted and gave him a stern look, and he lay back again. "Your dog won't let me up."

"Such a shame, you will have to lie in a soft bed and relax." I climbed up on Rocky's side of the bed to lie on top of my dog. "There, have a taste of your own medicine," I told him.

"You should drool on him, too. That'd show him," Alistair suggested.

"When are we supposed to go down to the party?" I asked, laying my head on Rocky's furry shoulder.

"Teagan said he'd send someone up. Do you know if Morrigan's coming?"

"I hope not. She wouldn't be much fun, and I don't think she'd enjoy it."

"Good," he said with a sigh.

"Oh, stop it. She's not that bad."

"Yes, she is. You should hear what she says when you're not around," he complained.

I lifted my head to look at him. "Is she mean to you behind my back?" I demanded.

He avoided my eyes and shifted uncomfortably. "Not mean, really, just... unpleasant." I decided to spend some time hanging around trying to catch her bothering him, and find out whether he really didn't mind, or just being macho. We lay and relaxed for a nice long time, enjoying the comfort and quiet, and both Rocky and Alistair dozed off, leaving me with two snoring males until Leliana came back and woke them up.

"Teagan says come down," she said, breathless with excitement. "Oh, Latitia, you're not going to wear your trousers, are you?"

I scowled. "I got cold."

"And the Maker knows that if Latitia gets cold, all bets are off," Alistair laughed, sliding out from under Rocky's head and wiping at the drool spot with a towel.

"The hall is warm," Leliana assured me. "You'd probably feel better without them riding up under your dress."

"Fine," I agreed, hiking up my skirt to pull them off. Alistair sighed and turned his back. Now that he'd stood up, I noticed he'd put on fresh clothes, too, an emerald green tunic over black trousers. They didn't quite fit, too tight across the shoulders and too loose everywhere else, and I thought Teagan must have given him his spares.

"I was right, you do look good in green," I informed him smugly, and he gave me a quick grin.

The party was noisy and crowded and hot, and I loved it. There was plenty of food, plenty to drink, good loud music, and nobody complained about Rocky.

At first, everyone busied themselves with dinner, and I took some of everything on the table, eventually needing two plates and a bowl. Leliana quickly gravitated to the musicians; Alistair stayed with me at the table, pointed out his favorites and identified the fruits and greens and other things that rarely made it down to Dust Town. I went back to get us both seconds on strawberry salad, a new shared favorite.

Then, by some signal I hadn't noticed, people started clearing out of the middle area, pushing tables against the wall and turning to look at the musicians. The singer, who also played the fiddle, came forward and named a dance I didn't know, and about a dozen people came out and stood in pairs arranged in rows. The music began and the fiddler started calling out commands, naming steps that the dancers followed, silly things like clapping hands and twirling.

I watched, enthralled. Dwarf dancing was a lot like this, structured and rhythmic. I observed until I thought I'd learned most of the commands that got repeated a lot, and tugged on Alistair's sleeve.

"Dance with me," I urged.

He looked panicky. "I don't dance," he mumbled, stuffing his hands in his pockets and staring down at his shoes. I rolled my eyes at him and turned to Rocky, who wagged.

"Come on, buddy. Up!" I gestured for him to jump up, and he stood on his hind legs. I grasped his paws gently and put them on my shoulder, and we shuffled in a circle while he wagged furiously and tried to lick my face. Then I released his paws and twirled.

"Spin!" I ordered, and repeated the motion. He looked at me quizzically, and turned around on all four feet. "Good boy," I praised. "Now like this! Up!" I helped him balance and then asked him to spin again, and he did, more or less. Comprehension dawned, and he dog-grinned at me and wagged harder than ever.

I played with him, putting together longer and more complicated motions, until I had taught him everything that didn't require a thumb. He oozed with pride, but I decided to end the game because he looked like his hind legs were tired from the unnatural motion. I gave him the remains of a leg of lamb and he hid under the table to eat it.

I fixed Alistair with a stern look. "I just taught a dog to dance," I told him.

"Yes, I was impressed," he agreed, clueless of my nefarious plan.

I put my hands on my hips. "So how come he dances, and you don't? Are you going to tell me that Rocky is a better dancer than you?"

The panicky look came back and he cast about him, looking for some excuse. I grabbed his hands and dragged him away from the wall, deliberately repeating the same actions I'd just used to teach Rocky, placing his hands on my shoulders and shuffling in a circle.

"Good boy," I teased, trying to provoke him out of his shyness, and he glowered. "What, am I being mean and you're totally a better dancer than a dog? Go on, show me what a mean, mean woman I am by dancing with me."

"Fine," he said gruffly. "Just you watch. I'll show you nobody can step on your feet better than I can."

It worked!

It turned out he did know this dance, and wasn't bad, just shy. We skipped a lot of steps, the more daring ones I didn't want to force Alistair to do – basically anything that would require him to do something other than hold my hands and follow me. Then the song ended and another began, faster-paced and featuring lots of fiddle and tambourine.

"I like this song," Alistair said, breaking his nervous silence and grinning like he knew a secret. I had just opened my mouth to ask about it, when the singer called for a new move I didn't know, and Alistair put his hands on my waist, picked me up, and spun me around.

To my absolute delight, this song was all his. I got held up, twirled, passed under one arm and around behind him, and I don't know what else. The song ended quickly, because most couples would probably be tired, but most couples weren't Alistair and his eighty-pound dwarven dancing partner.

The breathless fiddler told us all this kind of organized dancing was over, and there was some more tuning and twanging from the stage while they got ready for something else. Alistair was grinning and proud of himself. I beamed at him and just managed not to hug him, clasping his hands instead.

"That was _so_ much fun, thank you _so_ much!" I gushed, and he went a bit shy again but smiled anyway.

I was thirsty now, so I went to check out the drinks table with Alistair following me. They had beer, wine, and water; too bad. My mother's drunkenness had permanently soured my stomach to any kind of alcohol, so I never drank; but nobody likes a sober dwarf at a party, so I'd learned to act tipsy, at least enough to match what everyone else was doing. It was easy – laugh a little too loud, lean a little too close, gesture a little too broadly, and suddenly find fart jokes hilarious. I watched Alistair for cues. He picked up a mug of beer, so I found a stein and filled it with water while no one was looking.

The music started again and I was disappointed to see that couples had paired off and began something much more complex and integrated, following a lute and pipes. Fewer of the townsfolk were dancing, and all of knights and nobles had come out, so apparently this was a class thing. I sighed and leaned on the wall next to Alistair to watch.

He nursed that same beer, as far as I could tell, for the entire rest of the night, but I was still thirsty and refilled my stein twice. While I was away the second time, Leliana materialized from where she had been singing with the musicians, and talked animatedly to Alistair about the dancing.

"Everyone else is having so much fun. Oh, come on, this one is easy, you must know it. I don't know anyone else here. Please?"

Alistair shifted on his feet and looked to me for rescue, but probably not the kind of rescue he got.

"You know this dance? Teach it to me," I ordered, taking his beer away and handing it to Leliana before pulling him after me to a less-busy part of the hall.

"That wasn't very nice," he reproved, holding one of my hands and putting the other on his shoulder.

"I got you first," I retorted, looking down and copying his steps. It was indeed easy, four steps that worked their way around in a figure-eight. "You know, you are a much better dancer than Rocky. You haven't tried to lick my face even once," I added. For some reason, this made him blush. That reminded me -

"I've been meaning to ask you something," I said, still watching our feet. "Something that might explain the blushing."

"Oh?" he asked, nudging me away so he could twirl me once before bringing me back.

"You were living in the Chantry up until a few months ago, right? So does that mean you've never..." I wagged my eyebrows at him suggestively.

He missed a step and I dodged before he stepped on me. "Have I ever what, exactly?" he asked, with an air of desperation. "Owned a pair of shoes? Ridden a wyvern? Darned my own socks?"

I just waited, my eyes gleaming wickedly.

He blushed brighter and kept going, grinning. "Have I ever seen a basilisk? Eaten jellied ham? Have I ever licked a lamppost in winter?"

This was too much to resist. I joined in, teasing, "Have you ever gone spelunking in the Deep Roads? Played Hide-the-Helmet? Ridden a wild horse bareback?"

He snorted and dissolved in giggles. "Oh Maker, that's filthy! But you go first – have _you_ ever licked a lamppost in winter?"

"I've licked my share of lampposts and then some!" I declared with more glee than truth, certain I was about to see a whole new shade of blush.

"Wow," he looked momentarily blank. "That's... quite a mental image." He shook himself and plowed on. "In answer to your question, no, I haven't. Not that I haven't... thought about it..."

This time he did step on me. I stifled my yelp and pulled my toes out from under him. I don't think he even noticed.

"I mean, there weren't many opportunities in the Chantry, and anyway, they taught us to be gentlemen in the presence of beautiful women such as yourself. That's not so bad, is it?" He actually looked a little worried. I supposed human males probably felt as embarrassed about their virginity as dwarven men do. Stone take them, the things they will do to get rid of it...

I suppressed a little shudder at a particularly unpleasant memory, and finally parsed what he'd just said. "Beautiful?" I asked skeptically. "I know I'm not, you liar. At best, I'm cute, and I'm not just fishing for compliments."

He frowned at me, and I went on. "I'm way too tall for a girl and I have _no_ tits at _all _and I used to pass as Rica's brother back when I kept my hair short."

He let go of my hand to gesture at the other dancers. "Look at the other women here. Nobody's going to call you too tall, and as for your other objections – _well_. Some would say it's a matter of taste..." He trailed off, carefully avoiding looking at me.

I was absorbing this information when Leliana appeared beside us. "May I cut in?" she asked.

"No," I said immediately, tightening my grip on Alistair's hand and shoulder, which made him smile, but right away I regretted being rude to her twice in a row.

"I was speaking to Alistair," she said, her eyes sly, and she ducked under his arm and took my hands to lead me off in a new dance. I was so shocked, all I could do was follow her along.

She was light on her feet and a good teacher, giving me new steps as fast as I could learn them but not so fast that I got frustrated, and soon we were laughing and having a great time. Eventually, though, we both got thirsty and ran back to Alistair who was working on that same flat, warm beer. I picked up my stein and drained it.

"Leliana's a _very_ good dancer," I told Alistair, hanging on his arm, still giggling.

"You look like you're having fun," he commented, smiling, but then Teagan came over and invited him to sit and have dessert with them at the front table.

"I can't, I'm stuck," he laughed, holding up his arm. I hung on and swung from it like a spider for a second before he set me back down.

"Oh, you are all welcome, of course," Teagan said hastily, bowing to me. I looked over at the head table and it looked like the _least_ fun part of the entire party, and I didn't fancy making small talk with nobles while trying to figure out what to do with three forks.

"Go ahead, you two, I'm just going to wander around some more. Thanks anyway," I told them, releasing Alistair to go refill my drink and investigate the banquet table again. Rocky stuck his heavy muzzle out from beneath the table and under my skirt to poke my leg with his cold nose. I squeaked and looked down, and he slunk out and whined, gesturing towards the door with his head.

"Do you want to go out?" I asked, and he pranced about, leading me outside. I followed, carrying my water and a pink strawberry cookie, but once we got outside, he kept bouncing around, trying to get me to follow him out across the castle bridge.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," I grumbled, hugging myself and breaking into a run to cross the bridge, with its chilly wind, as quickly as possible. He led me all the way down to the lake shore and presented me with a stick.

"You brought me out here in the cold to throw a _stick_ for you?" I demanded, and he made a great show of humility and apology, before presenting the stick again. I sighed and threw it out into the lake, and he bounded after it, sending up a great spray of water. When he brought it back, I warned him that if he shook and got me wet, I would skin him and turn him into a nice warm blanket. He slicked his ears back submissively, then prodded me with the stick.

I stood on the shore, arms wrapped around myself, throwing a stupid stick for my stupid dog because I am such a stupid softie for this beast. I was thinking about my Mabari book and an interesting chapter on grooming, when I heard a step behind me and turned quickly. Rocky saw me react to the noise and barked.

"Just me," Alistair called. "What are you doing out here?"

"Throwing a stick for my spoiled dog," I replied sourly.

"Aren't you cold?"

"Ancestors save me, _yes_," I said, shivering. "I have goosebumps on body parts I didn't know I have. But why are _you_ here?"

"Looking for you," he answered, standing behind me and rubbing my arms briskly to warm them. "I realized I'd seen you refill that cup of yours four times. I mean, I know people say dwarves can hold their liquor, but you're so little, and when I felt you'd left I got worried."

I grinned and showed him my cup's contents. "I'm a filthy liar," I confessed. "It's just water."

He frowned. "Why would you not want people to know you were drinking water?"

"Because, at least at dwarf parties, if you aren't drinking, people get suspicious," I explained. "I suppose things are different up here, but old habits die hard." I shivered again and backed up to lean against him for warmth.

"Why don't you drink?" he asked, standing _very_ still.

"See? Everyone asks that," I complained, tossing the stick. "It's OK," I added quickly, as he started to apologize. "My mother is a useless drunk, and the thought of it makes me sick."

"I'm sorry," he said softly, distracted from his own awkwardness and letting his hands rest on my shoulders. "I shouldn't have asked."

"Nah, you should know these things." Rocky returned with the stick, and I threw it again, a little too hard. Maybe I wasn't quite as cool about it as I pretended. He must have noticed; he rubbed my shoulders soothingly and said nothing.

"That's nice," I said after a while.

"I owe you a backrub," he reminded me, smiling.

"I had fun with you tonight," I told him, tilting my head forward so he could do my neck, too.

"Me, too. We could go back, if you want."

"Mmm. Busy."

He laughed a little, and we stood on the lakeshore while he worked on my shoulders, too gentle to be effective but nice anyway. After a while, I remembered I wanted to ask about Connor.

"How's Connor doing? Does he remember what happened?"

"He seems fine, and no, he doesn't remember. Don't think about sad things, you're making my job harder," he joked, digging his thumbs into the base of my neck. I realized he was trying to mimic what I'd done to him a few days ago and smiled.

"OK," I agreed. "Leliana told me this great joke about an Antivan whore, a Fereldan knight, and a Mabari who walk into a bar..."

The joke went over well, so I also retold her story about the bird-hair lady, and then we laughed a bit unkindly about her shoe obsession, and the way her face fell when I told her I was wearing boots to the party.

Finally, though, I had to admit defeat. "My toes are going to freeze and fall off," I complained. "Can we go back inside?"

Back at the castle, the candles were guttering, and people were milling around looking for their cloaks and saying goodbyes. I stopped to mooch leftover dessert off the head table, where Leliana found me.

"Latitia, I was telling the musicians about you, and they want to know if you'll teach them a song from Orzammar," she said, bouncing with anticipation.

"Oh," I said, a little nonplussed. "Uh, sure. I need an echo, though. Does this hall echo?" To answer my own question, I picked up a spoon and banged it hard on the table. Everyone stopped and looked at me, but I got my answer – no good echo.

"Hang on a minute," I told her, picking up a plate. I circled the hall, banging my spoon on the plate until I found an echo I liked, and gestured the musicians over.

I tapped out a beat on the plate and then handed it to the piper, telling him to keep it up. Then I went and got an empty water jug and another spoon, tapped a new beat, and handed it to the fiddler. The piper had stopped when I started a new beat, and I had to remind him of his and order him to keep it going.

I dug around by the main table some more, finally finding a nice big tub, and took that to the lute player, showing him how to keep a third beat with his hands on its base, before giving a fourth beat to the bassist to pound out on his own instrument. I picked up the tambourine to do the hard part.

It took a few measures, during which I prodded one or the other musician to speed up or slow down, before all at once the beats meshed, and everyone went _oooh!_

"If we were going to dance, the dancers make up the accent sounds by clapping their hands or stomping their feet," I shouted to Leliana over the percussion.

"But isn't it different depending on the echo?" she yelled back.

"Of course it is, you have to do it different ever time, that's what makes it fun!" The beat got into my bones and I swayed on my feet, nodding my head and swinging my hips as I hammered out the lead rhythm on the tambourine.

"It's awfully loud for a cave, though, isn't it?"

"If your ears aren't numb, you're not partying hard enough," I bellowed, and she laughed.

Eventually the musicians lost the beat, but we had a good time and exchanged handshakes and one-armed hugs and promised to get together at some point and play again.

By now, all the candles had died, and the only light came from the oil lamps in the walls. Servants had come out of the woodwork to clean up, and the room was losing its heat rapidly as people kept opening the door to leave.

"Aren't you tired?" Alistair asked. "It's getting late."

"No, I'm all riled up," I laughed. "Ooh, I know – let's go back to your room and use the fireplace and tell scary stories!"

"Right, that will make you want to sleep for sure," he shook his head.

"We could play strip poker," I suggested innocently, knowing he would instantly agree to story time. It worked, and we all went up to his room, where the very nice chamberlain had already had his fire lit. Alistair took one chair and Leliana the other, but I sat on the floor to get close to the heat, with Rocky sprawled out flat beside me.

I went first to get us started; it's only fair, since this was my idea. "This is the story of Gherin Hammerthief," I began, and told the ancient dwarven myth that was still brand-new for my surfacer friends, complete with gestures and spooky sounds. They were an appreciative audience, even Rocky, who barked fiercely when I imitated the darkspawn pounding on Gherin's door.

"And some nights, the clang of his hammer still echoes through Ordin's Thaig as he strives to this day to rebuild his beloved golem wife," I concluded.

"Me next," Leliana chirped, clapping her hands. "Let me tell you of the Ogre of the Silverfalls..." And she broke into song, weaving a sad ballad of an ogre who fell in love with a human woman, only to be killed by his love's son, her clear, sweet voice filling the room. As the last notes of her song died away, Morrigan walked by the door, and I called to her.

"We're telling stories, I bet you've got good ones," I said happily.

She scowled and leaned on the doorway. "Once upon a time, a foolish Chantry sister sent a group of Templars into the Wilds to hunt down a witch. They were never seen again. The end." Then she stalked off.

We sat in stunned silence for a few seconds, before I laughed. "Well, what do you expect from Morrigan. I suppose we should all appreciate her brevity."

"I'm sleepy," Leliana admitted, standing up and stretching like a cat.

"OK, we'll see you at breakfast," I said, turning my attention back to seeing how close I could get to the fire before I burst into flames. After a moment, I said to Alistair, "I'm impressed that the people here have such good spirits, after everything that's happened to them. They're strong."

"They have a saying here, that the iron in the hills is also in the people's souls." He knelt beside me and pulled the grate across the fireplace, dislodging my feet, which were perilously close to ignition.

"Hey," I protested.

"I'm too tired to carry your smoldering carcass down to Mother Hannah." He sat and leaned against the warm stones of the wall by the fireplace, letting his head fall back against the wall and stifling a yawn.

"I suppose I should go away and stop bothering you," I grumbled, playing with Rocky's velvet ears and fighting the urge to just lie down right there by the fire and go to sleep on his lap. My room seemed awfully far away and my head had grown heavy.

"You're not bothering me," he said softly, which did nothing for my resolve.

I steeled myself and stood up. "Nevertheless, we have a long day ahead of us and I don't want to waste the chance for a full night's sleep in such a nice, big bed."

"Yes," he sighed. "And real breakfast tomorrow, too. Eggs, maybe sausages."

"Sweet dreams." I offered him a hand up.

"Dream of the sweet, tender embrace of an ogre lover," he teased, taking it.

"Only if _you_ dream of a wife made of stone who weighs more than Bodahn's full wagon," I returned, stepping out into the corridor, and he chuckled as I shut the door.


	18. Broken Circle

We set out that morning in high spirits, Bodahn's wagon loaded heavily with gifts: Slabs of cured bacon, a crate of eggs, dried fruits and vegetables, bread and, of course, more cheese - not to mention blankets, bedrolls and tents. Camping out was looking a lot more inviting. "Tents" as a concept had never caught on in Orzammar, where the temporary dwelling of choice usually consisted of corrugated steel plates leaned against a wall. And when my travels had kept me on the Roads for more than a day, I'd had to bury myself in something malodorous to keep predators from finding me while I slept – having a steel-plated Warden watch over me was a big improvement.

As the day wore on, though, the sun shone down hot and strong, and a nagging headache built up at the base of my skull. An odd sensation of exposure and vulnerability sent me walking closer and closer to Alistair until I accidentally pushed him off the edge of the road into the ditch, to much amusement from the others and a flurry of apologies from me. I switched to riding in the back of the Spoiled Princess's empty wagon with Rocky, and let Leliana distract me by identifying the plants and birds we passed.

We stopped at the same spot we'd used previously and set up house quickly, re-using our old firepit and logs. Alistair volunteered to make dinner in order to use up the roast leg of lamb before it went bad, and dumped it and a sack of dried peas into the pot with water and salt. An hour later, he proudly ladled the traditional Ferelden lamb and pea stew into our new wooden bowls to very mixed reception.

I hungrily devoured the entire bowl of soup before noticing I had burned my tongue and running around looking for cold water. Morrigan picked out the lamb with exquisite care and left the peas behind, dumping her bowl on the ground before returning to her tent. I noticed that she just happened to do this right in front of Rocky, who fell upon the leftovers with delight. Leliana, meanwhile, stared accusingly at her bowl of drab greenish-brown sludge.

"What... is this exactly?" she asked finally, prodding it with her spoon.

"It's my traditional Ferelden lamb and pea stew," Alistair explained.

"Ah. I suppose I am not used to lamb prepared in this way. In Orlesia, lamb is seared quickly and served with fresh vegetables and grains, none of this heavy stew," Leliana declared in her delicate accent. I wondered what she had been finding to eat in Redcliffe if not stew. Maybe she'd persuaded Bella to make her something different; the girls had gotten on well.

"Food shouldn't be frilly like that," Alistair said stoutly. "Here in Ferelden, we do things right. I throw everything in the biggest pot I have, then boil it until it's completely unappetizing. That's how I know it's ready."

"Braising is the best way to cook cheap meat," I pointed out. "Not everyone can afford prime steak three meals a day, you know. Where I come from, you don't turn your nose up at any kind of meat."

"I have not had the opportunity to learn about your background, Latitia," Leliana asked, suddenly pert and inquisitive. "Except that you hail from Orzammar."

"From Dust Town, specifically," I grunted, scraping more stew out of the pot. "And that is all you need to know."

"I'm afraid I am not familiar with Dust Town," she admitted.

"Good for you." I did not feel up to discussing my impoverished origins tonight, not with my blood pounding in my head like a herd of brontos.

"In Orlesia, life was very different," she informed me a bit wistfully. "Everywhere there was music, and art, and dancing. And the shoes! Oh, the _shoes_! All satin and ribbon and lace! Not like these shapeless lumps you wear here."

I looked down at my soft, serviceable boots and Alistair's steel-plated ones, then raised an eyebrow at her. Not the shoe conversation _again_.

"I wear boots because I'm doing something important with my life," I said flatly. "My sister wore little slippers because she was a whore. I'm hardly going to sigh and swoon over the frippery of a faraway nation and the ease with which their women settle into sex slavery."

Leliana's mouth hung open in hurt astonishment, and Alistair jumped in. "No, no, she didn't mean it like that. Dust Town's very different, that's all, right, Latitia? Isn't it _interesting_ to learn about other cultures! Like, when I first went to the Chantry, I thought for sure the Templars had no faces because they never took those helmets off. Then one day I saw one about to remove his helmet and I screamed and ran away. Silly, eh?"

Leliana forced a little giggle, and I made myself smile. Why had I said that? She was obviously homesick... I should have said something sympathetic.

Something had just struck a nerve for me, the innocent disgust she'd directed at us and our shoes and our food, a mild reminder of what I'd hoped to leave behind me when I left my home. The assumption that a woman's worth lay in her attractiveness; the superiority of the leisure class over the people who actually got shit done.

Also, I mused, the headache and weirdness had been steadily worsening and probably didn't help. I'd better make my escape before I knifed someone for commenting on the weather. "I think I should go to bed, guys. I don't feel very good, and all I can do is yell at everyone. Goodnight."

A chorus of 'goodnights' followed me as I pushed open my tent flap and contemplated my new blankets and bedroll. I stripped off my armor with a sigh of relief and was arranging my bedding around me when Rocky's big head nudged its way into my tent. I waved him over and invited him to lie next to me and keep me warm. I heard the murmur of conversation continue for a while, the light from the fire dimming as the coals were allowed to settle, and the clanking of someone washing out the pot and bowls. I felt a stab of guilt for not helping clean up.

With a frustrated grunt, I rolled over and shoved my blankets around into a better pillow shape, and after a while, finally fell asleep.

* * *

I found myself again on top of the tower at Ostagar, watching in cold dread as the darkspawn army slaughtered the last of the Gray Wardens, only this time, I stood alone - no Alistair beside me. I looked for him, feeling something was wrong here, and when I didn't see him I leaned over the edge of the stone wall to search the battlefield. My eyes seemed unnaturally sharp, and I found I could see every detail of the battle below. I picked out Duncan and the King easily, and then saw to my horror that Alistair had somehow joined them, the trio fighting back-to-back and surrounded completely.

Then I heard the soft rush of wings and looked up. An impossibly large bird with Flemeth's face sitting incongruously where its beak should be landed on the tower, and moved to scoop me up in its talons.

"No," I protested, backing away, "You're supposed to save both of us. I can't do this alone!"

The Flemeth-bird opened its mouth, but with a swoop and a roar, the titanic Archdemon stooped out of the night sky and struck her, crushing her body against the stone.

_You should have run_, it screamed, its voice echoing in my skull. _Now he will die, too. Watch!_

And it dove off the tower and swept its flaming wings over the last of fighters below, tearing and shredding humans and darkspawn alike in an orgy of violence. Unable to look away, I watched helplessly as it gripped Alistair's weakly struggling body and casually tore him in two, an implausible amount of gore fountaining from the two halves, soaking the entire battlefield, pouring on and on. The Archdemon bellowed its triumph, bathing itself in his blood and gleefully tossing body parts in the air and snatching them in its mouth to devour them.

This also seemed wrong. Impossible. The sound of the screams and roars dimmed as I struggled to focus, and then suddenly Duncan stood beside me, his body dreadfully maimed and showering me in hot blood.

"Coward!" He shrieked at me. "You should have died instead of us!"

I stared and the nagging sensation of wrongness grew stronger. "You're dead," I told him.

Then his body exploded and revealed the massive form of the dragon, shouldering its way out of Duncan's corpse like a moth from a cocoon. It opened its mouth and gathered its breath to bathe me in flame, then froze suddenly. The entire scene went silent and still as I fought to pull myself out of this dream. I covered my ears and closed my eyes and thought _not real, not real, __**wake**__**up**_, until I felt nothing but my sweat-dampened clothing and the warmth of my dog beside me.

I opened my eyes and lay quietly, concentrating on breathing. I knew, I _knew_ it wasn't real. Cursed Archdemon. I gathered up the blanket that wasn't imprisoned under Rocky's heavily sleeping body, and crept silently out of my tent.

Alistair still sat his watch beside the fire, wrapped in his own blanket. I sat next to him on the log and stared at the smoldering campfire.

"Something wrong?" he asked quietly.

"Archdemon," I answered with a grimace. "Tried to convince me that you had died along with Duncan and I was alone. I had a headache all day and I suspect he might have been digging around in my head for material."

He chuckled wryly. "Remember when you found me in the kitchens that night at the Redcliffe Inn? I'd just been woken up by that same dream, of being alone on the tower."

"'He's losing his touch if he's recycling dreams," I laughed. "He kept running into trouble with mine - he'd show me something impossible and I'd start to wake up, so he'd try to terrify me some other way."

"Poor fellow," Alistair said in mock sympathy. "Next time, throw him a bone and scream or something. You know, just so he can feel good about himself."

I shivered a little as a flash of memory - blood and gore in impossible volume pouring from - no, _not_ real, I told myself firmly. I shifted a little closer to Alistair and looked up at him, trying to pretend I _wasn't_ reassuring myself that he was alive because I _knew_ it had just been a dream, damn it. He caught me looking and I smiled at him. He smiled back, then held out his arm, offering to share his blanket, and I scooted under it and pressed my cheek against his armored chest, the metal cold but reassuringly solid against my skin.

I zoned out watching the coals burn down, and must have dozed for a while, because the next thing I knew was Alistair gently rubbing my shoulder to wake me up.

"My watch is over, and I really ought to sleep," he told me when I opened my eyes.

"I'll miss you," I said without thinking.

"Will you? Because sometimes I can't tell if you actually like _me_, or if I'm just a warm body and a sword," he said with uncharacteristic candor. "Like it doesn't matter to you _which_ Warden is sharing his blanket with you. Which Warden survived Ostagar."

I looked up at him, and he met my gaze and tried to look calm. His acting was terrible, though, because his bronze eyes swam with fear and the pain of past rejection, and I heard the unspoken question, "Am I really who you want beside you? _Should I have died instead of Duncan?_"

_Someone's been thinking long thoughts on his watch_, I realized.

"The Archdemon could have shown me anything, but after looking in my head, he chose to show me your death," I told him gravely. "I'm sitting here now because that frightened me more than anything else – just like he knew it would – and I needed to know you were all right. Not just that I'm not alone, but that you, specifically, are still with me."

He blinked, and I watched emotions flutter across his open face like a flock of birds. I laid my head back on his shoulder to give him privacy. After a few seconds I felt him rest his cheek against the top of my head and his arm tighten around me, just a little.

* * *

When one of the settling coals popped and reminded me of the passage of time, I shifted a bit and he let go quickly. "You can go to sleep, I didn't mean to keep you up," I apologized. He smiled and nodded and tried to avoid eye contact, probably feeling embarrassed at himself for 'showing weakness', and I left and returned to my blankets to try to salvage some real sleep before my watch.

We arrived at the Tower in time to for a late lunch at the Spoiled Princess, returning the tired horses to their stable. I lingered, patting the huge animals on the flank as high up as I could reach and enjoying their funny horse smell, while the others went in to order food. After a few minutes Alistair came back and asked what was wrong.

"Nothing, I'm petting the horse," I answered. "I can't reach much of him, though."

"Her," he corrected. "She's a mare – a female horse." He lugged an empty vegetable crate over and dropped it by her forelegs for me to stand on. I did, and gleefully wormed my fingers into her dense white mane.

He watched for a moment before asking, "What is it with you and Leliana? One minute you two are practically inseparable, the next you can't stand the sight of her."

I cringed inwardly. I knew I'd behaved badly, and there was no way to answer this question without looking like a shallow jerk. "She's _fancy_," I muttered.

He laughed, incredulous. "Fancy? You're kidding."

"She reminds me of how my sister's pimp wanted her to act. What he wanted to force her to be, all bubbles and lace, so she'd fit in at court. And every now and then, Leliana lets slip that she still thinks of herself as a high-class court suck-up and makes fun of my shoes or something, and that really strikes a nerve."

"But the rest of the time, you're happy to have her entertain you."

I felt my face redden and tried to sound casual. "Yeah, pretty much."

"You know, she tries to please you. Why do you think she's been talking about horses for the past day and a half? It's because when she does, you hang around her and smile."

He picked up a comb and started removing a cluster of burrs from the mare's tail, clearly also trying to act casual. "If you look at her when she thinks she's alone, she looks so sad. I almost feel bad for taking her away from her life."

"She wanted to come along. We didn't force her to do anything," I insisted, flushing worse, probably in the blotchy-salami stage by now.

"You're right." He tossed the burr into a refuse pile and started on another one. The horse shook herself irritably, and he stroked her rump to calm her. I watched her ears flicking as she listened to him.

"I'll try to be nicer to her," I told him eventually. "I can't promise anything, though. Dwarves have a hot temper about these things. It's a cultural failing. But I'll try."

He nodded, losing some of the nervous tension he'd held in his shoulders. I felt a pang of guilt for being defensive when he hadn't done anything except point out I'd been a classist arsehole.

"Shall we get some lunch?" I asked when he tossed another burr into the pile.

"Please," he agreed fervently, lifting me off the crate by the waist so he could stack it back where it belonged.

The innkeeper had appropriated Bodahn for some serious business negotiation, and we packed our bags full of jerky, left him there with our camping stuff and trooped down to the docks, where Carroll still stood guard, tossing bits of bread into the water for the creepy-looking fish with their glowing eyes.

When he heard our approach, he looked up and saw Alistair. "Back for more?" he called. "Or are you going to run away again? Demons too scary for you, big bad Warden? Bet you wish you finished your Templar training now, don't you!"

"Yes, because I can see the Templars have a much more exciting, dangerous job, what with all the standing around and feeding fish," Alistair shot back. "I bet you've got some great stories. Do the girls swoon when you tell them of your prowess with the oars?"

"I don't know," Carroll said, grinning at me. "Do you?"

I clasped my hands and made my biggest, dewiest eyes at him. "Oh, Carroll! You're so impressive and manly! Tell me again about how you so bravely ran away from the mean witch woman last time we were here!"

He looked behind us, wild-eyed. "Is she here, too? I don't see her. You want to cross the lake? Let's go - now, quick, before she comes!"

We piled into the boat, and I looked around for her, wondering where she'd gone, when a huge black crow landed in the bow of the boat and shimmered into Morrigan's form right in front of poor Carroll. He threw himself backwards away from her and would have fallen out of the boat if Leliana hadn't been sitting behind him and caught him. Morrigan threw her head back and crowed with laughter - literally. I wondered if, after the change, she retained a few characteristics of the animal for a time. Carroll, face white, made some effort to recover his dignity and began rowing the little ferry across the lake.

Bored, I watched Carroll and Alistair's faces, thinking about what history they must have. Carroll seemed like he could be a lot of fun, if he wasn't busy picking on Alistair. Could Carroll just be mad at him for leaving the Templars? But then why would Alistair hold Carroll in contempt as well?

When we left the boat and began crossing the white-paved courtyard to the long steps leading up to the front door, I decided to ask him about it. After all, he'd just asked me the same question about Leliana.

"Hey, why don't you and Carroll get along? You seem like you have a lot in common, and I bet you could have a lot of fun together if you weren't so busy being obnoxious to each other."

I probably could have phrased that better, because his jaw tightened and he snapped, "I am nothing like Carroll."

"I'm sorry," I said immediately. "I didn't say that right. Obviously Carroll is a dumbass if he's stuck here rowing a ferry while you're out saving the world. I just thought, he's kind of goofy and might be fun to banter with."

"He's not goofy because he's fun," he growled. "He's goofy because he'd drugged out of his skull."

My mouth hung open in shock, and I grabbed his arm to stop us before we went inside. "What do you mean? Why do they let him do that while he's on duty? What's going on here?"

He roughly jerked off his helmet and ruffled his hair, searching for words. Finally, he took my arm and led me away from the others.

"The Chantry controls the Templars by controlling the lyrium trade with the dwarves," he explained. "They tell us - them - that the only way to use Templar abilities is to use lyrium, so they give it to them during training."

"But lyrium's poisonous to humans, isn't it?"

"Small doses aren't deadly. That's not the problem. The problem is that it's intensely addictive, and once the Templars have been taking it long enough, they can't live without it," he said bitterly. "And eventually it drives them crazy. If they manage to get extra lyrium somehow, by bribing the merchants or something, they start to go crazy sooner. Like Carroll."

"Did they make you take it, too?" I asked, horrified.

"A little. I'd only just started the final training when Duncan came and got me out." He passed a shaking hand over his brow, remembering his narrow escape. "It wasn't so bad. The worst part is, the things they taught me - I can still do them, now, even without lyrium. It's all a lie. They're killing their men just so they can keep them docile."

"We have to tell the other Templars," I urged.

"No!" he exclaimed. "That is an absolute secret, totally forbidden to speak of. It's why they didn't want me to go - so I wouldn't find out, and then go around telling people. You don't want to know what they would do to us if we told."

"This is too awful," I whispered. "All those poor men in there. And poor Carroll!"

"Carroll's a coward," he shook his head. "He would still be perfectly fine if he wasn't so scared of the withdrawal that he spends his entire stipend on lyrium. Don't feel bad for him - feel bad for the old Templars who die in an asylum."

"I do," I nodded, my eyes suspiciously wet. I couldn't believe how close he'd come to being stuck there permanently. Then I thought of Arl Eamon. Had he known about this when he sent Alistair to them for training? May the Stone take him now if he had.

"Thank you for trusting me with this," I added. "I swear I won't tell. I'm sorry for making you dredge up the past for me."

"Yes, well, the past is past, as they say." He took a deep breath and smiled, then clapped me on the shoulder. "Come on, let's go kill demons."

I ignored the looks of curiosity on the others' faces and led us to the great ward-covered doors, pushing them open with Alistair's help and seeing that the scene inside had changed very little, except that the wounded had galvanized into either healthy or dead. Greagior and the other Templars still wore their massive armor and stood about looking impressive, and I took note of the helmets Alistair had mentioned last night. They had no visor, and only a narrow slit for vision and air; I could see how a child might be frightened of the faceless man inside.

The effect was marred somewhat by their long, embroidered – what was that, a skirt? A kilt? Whatever it was, it probably protected them from magic, but looked ridiculous.

Greagior hailed us with grim civility, and I asked about the status of the Denerim reinforcements and the Rite of Annulment, but he told us that Denerim lay over a week's travel away and no help would come for at least several more days. He told us we were welcome to make use of his quartermaster but still considered our plans suicidal, and coolly ignored us after that.

I poked through the quartermaster's supplies and, using some of the money Teagan had pressed upon Alistair to help us on our quest, bought another crock of salve and more bandages. Morrigan broke her stony silence to remind me of demonic fire, so I picked up burn lotion and magically fire-resistant "liquid leather" - according to the label, the mint-scented lotion would form a protective coating that would last for about an hour after being applied and help insulate against both magical and natural fire.

I stood and stared at the door, thinking about the pack full of first aid and trying _not_ to think about the kinds of injuries we'd be using it on. I'd never seen a true abomination, a mage wholly lost to his demonic master, a twisted being of nightmares with powers unknown. What made me think we could succeed where the mighty Ser Greagior had failed?

Alistair came up to stand next to me, tightening the last buckle to strap his shield to his arm, and I froze in stomach-churning indecision for an instant before ducking under his arm to huddle between his shield and steel-clad body.

"I feel sick." I whispered so nobody else would hear. He rested his shield arm across my shoulders; his kite-shaped shield covered me from the top of my head down to mid-thigh, thick and heavy, and for a moment I allowed myself the illusory security of the enclosed space behind a piece of metal.

"I've got your back," he told me. Okay, a piece of metal attached to Alistair, that was a bit better. After a pause, he added, "You don't have to go."

_Stupid, stupid_, I scolded myself. I should not be actively encouraging his manly protective instincts. I pulled myself out of his dark, safe-feeling enclosure and stood up straight, putting on my brand-new 'Fearless Leader' face. It didn't fit quite right, but I hoped it would break in with time.

"We're going," I said firmly. "All of us." I looked at Leliana for confirmation that she wanted to come, and she nodded eagerly. Good.

The Templars guarding the door explained that these doors were actually one half of a pair, that a second set of doors lay twenty feet down the hallway and were warded shut. They would close the first doors after us, then remotely disarm the interior wards, and we'd have twenty seconds to get through the second doors before the wards re-armed themselves. I marveled at the level of security here and suppressed a shiver of fear when I thought about what dangers required such care.

The first doors opened, and we ran through and made it to the end of the hall just as the last sliver of light disappeared behind us. I pressed my hands against the door, ignoring the warning sting of the warding magic as it flashed along my skin and found me a difficult target. I felt a little more hopeful at the concrete evidence of what I'd heard but never seen – that most hostile magic rolled off dwarves like water off my oiled leather cloak.

Then the magic ceased and the doors burst open, revealing a wholly unexpected scene.

* * *

_Love and kisses to everyone who's messaged me, reviewed, favorited, or otherwise communicated with me in any way. Even a negative way! I'll take criticism! How will I know if you don't like something if you don't tell me, right?_

Seriously, though, the Tower was a tricky story arc for me, so if you like / don't like / want more of / want less of ANYTHING, tell me and I'll make adjustments accordingly. I'm having a blast with Latitia, and all I want is to share that with you. 


	19. No Survivors, My Ass

This room was full of people. Normal, non-demonically-possessed people, sitting around in doleful groups, all turning their pale faces towards us in the sparkling bluish glow of the magelights.

"No survivors, my ass," I swore angrily. Half of the people here were just children, the other half standing quickly to move between us and their charges, magic crackling between their fingers as they prepared for desperate action.

"Wait!" I called loudly, dropping my daggers and holding my hands up. "We're here to help!"

"Did Greagoir send you?" one wan but determined young woman asked.

I thought about the question before I answered. Judging by their reactions, they expected the Templars to come in and slaughter them all, or at least feared they might. "No," I said finally. "We're Gray Wardens and acting independently. We won't hurt you."

A whisper spread across the room as the others passed this information around. A tall woman with lovely white hair and a proud bearing pushed her way to the front of the group and introduced herself as Wynne, the senior mage in their group of survivors.

"I have created a barrier that kept the demons out of this room for the past several days," she explained. "We've been taking turns maintaining it, as it drains us quickly, but it's kept us safe thus far. At first, demons and worse hurled themselves against it day and night, but their attacks diminished in frequency and now come only occasionally. I know not what they are doing; they may even be fighting amongst themselves by now. Demons are not known for their ability to cooperate."

I felt a thrill of hope. Perhaps the demonic army had already torn itself apart, and all we would have to do is clean up. Wynne went on to say, "I can remove that barrier to let us through, but I will not be able to raise it again; I lack the components. We will have to be thorough and wipe out the demons and abominations as we go, clearing them away from the children before they can slip past us and attack."

"We can't hope that none will escape us," I objected. "This tower is huge. We have to assume they will be defending themselves against at least some attacks."

Wynne pursed her lips. "I have several adult mages here, but we are all tired and weakened by our trials. I do not know how much they can withstand, and we must protect the children."

"I'll stay," Leliana volunteered. "I can help take care of the children, too. Little ones like me."

I nodded my approval. "Sing to them. Take their minds off their ordeal. Most of them must be near despair by now."

"I will go with you," Wynne told us in a tone that brooked no disagreement. I hid my momentary irritation (_Who does she think she is, trying to dictate who will fight beside me!_) in favor of practicality: Wynne knew this tower better than any of us and would also know what dangers we faced. I made myself smile in welcome.

"You want us to bring along this preachy schoolmistress? And waste time guarding these pathetic excuses for mages?" Morrigan burst out, casting a scathing look at Wynne and the kiddies. "They allowed themselves to be corralled like cattle, and now their masters have chosen death for them. I say let them have it."

"You could have been one of them, if you were not kept safe with Flemeth," I pointed out, keeping my voice down and hoping she'd do the same. We did not need her to advertise her status as trainee Witch of the Wilds, not in the middle of the Circle Tower.

She gave a snort of disdain. "If that were so, I would have flung myself from the top of this Tower years ago. I will allow neither mind nor body to be subjugated in such a dehumanizing fashion."

"Not everyone is as strong as you." I tried to appeal to her vanity before the muttering from the crowd of young mages turned to action.

"That is abundantly clear. Look at them – servants of the Chantry," she gestured broadly, indicating the entire room's contents. "They lack respect for themselves and their power; why should _I_ respect them?"

Obviously I could not bring both Wynne and Morrigan. Eventually Wynne would direct that commanding manner on Morrigan, or Morrigan would provoke her beyond her ability to ignore it, and the entire Tower would explode. I made a quick decision then, and gestured for Morrigan to come away with me.

"Morrigan, I know this place is uncomfortable for you, and I appreciate your being here," I told her seriously. She scoffed. I ignored that and continued, picking words that I thought she would like. "We have to keep these mages down here alive so they will be able to support us against the Archdemon. As weak and inhibited as they are, they're still better than nothing. You don't want to be the sole mage on the entire battlefield, do you?"

She grudgingly shook her head, so I got to the point. "So I want you to stay here and guard them in Wynne's place." I overruled her cry of protest. "You're the only one I can rely on for this, Morrigan. I need Alistair in his capacity as a Templar, and surely you don't think Leliana can do it without you."

"Fine. Have it your way," she sighed in angry resignation, and I smiled at her and briefly touched the draped skirt of her robe, hoping to communicate some sort of friendly intent without offending her.

"Do you want me to talk to the woman Wynne's going to leave in charge of the others?" I asked. "I could tell her to keep the kids from bothering you. Or you could be a crow again and sit in the rafters. That way they hopefully won't get on your nerves so much."

She sniffed disdainfully. "I do not become a crow. I become a _raven_. But I understand your point; very well, I shall await your return perched safely above the grasping tentacles of these _larvae_." And with that, she shimmered and whooshed into her crow - sorry, _raven_ - shape and flung herself upwards, flapping heavily in the dead air up to the rafters.

I returned to where we'd left the others watching curiously, and pulled Alistair down to my level so I could whisper, "I got rid of her for now."

"Maker be praised," he whispered back, grinning.

Wynne issued final instructions to her charges while we waited before her shimmering, lace-patterned energy barrier. Idly, I poked it with the tip of my dagger, and it flashed purple in a most satisfying way. I experimented with prodding it with various other things, the dagger hilt, the toe of my boot, and so on, until Alistair went for the big one and bashed it with his shield.

"_Will_ you children _stop_ that!" Wynne's sharp command brought us up short and made Alistair hang his head and shuffle his feet. I thumbed my nose at her when she turned her back, making him giggle.

"All right," she said, coming up behind us when all was ready. "I'm going to remove the barrier now. Prepare yourselves."

"Stay behind me," Alistair instructed, waving me back from the door and couching his shield. I took hold of Rocky's collar and the three of us, Rocky, Wynne and me, waited to see what lay on the other side of the barrier.

Wynne focused herself and, with a swift chopping motion, she dispelled the barrier. The corridor beyond looked more or less empty, except for the scorched and mangled bodies of Templars and young mages who'd tried to escape and arrived too late. Wynne uttered a strangled sob and clasped her hands to her mouth.

"I - I didn't know there were people out here, trying to get in," she whispered, her face agonized.

"You did what you had to, to protect the others," I assured her. "You've done amazingly well. Greagoir was convinced nobody would have survived at all. Focus on the children you've saved."

She swallowed hard and stood straight again. "Yes, of course. Now, the Tower is arranged in a circular pattern, with corridors that ring each floor, one set of stairs up and one down, and a larger center room on each floor. We should travel each floor, then proceed up the stairs and block it as best we can."

"One room at a time, one floor at a time. We can do this," I said with more conviction than I felt. "All right, I'll check out this first room and then you -"

"No way," Alistair interrupted. "There's magelights everywhere, and anyway, most abominations don't even have eyes. You can't hide from them."

I shuddered. "No eyes? Yuck."

"You have no idea. Hang onto your lunch," he warned. "Let me go first, all right? Let them target me, and then you and Rocky flank them."

I nodded and followed him as he moved, crouched behind his shield, to the first door down. He gestured for me to stop a few feet from the door and prodded it open with the tip of his sword. It swung loosely, revealing an empty room; the hinges tore from the charred wood, and the door collapsed to the stone floor with a crunch. I winced at the noise, and sure enough, a moan came from the next room.

Alistair abandoned the empty room and stood squarely in the middle of the corridor, waiting for whatever it was to emerge. A bulbous, grotesque form shambled into view, dragging the gnawed remains of someone's leg, its belly swollen to bursting. It stood, swaying, and focused on us with apparent difficulty. With a howl of unbearable, unceasing hunger, it dropped the leg and lunged. Its gaping maw hung with shreds of flesh, and gore dripped from its outstretched claws as it grabbed at Alistair's shield with startling speed.

He swung and chopped off a spindly arm, and it latched onto his wrist with its mouth, gnawing at the steel bracer with frustrated groans. With a grunt of disgust, he shoved it away with a blow from his shield and decapitated the pitiful wretch.

"What was that?" I demanded, already grossed out and we'd barely started.

"A possession by a demon of hunger," Wynne replied. "Weak things. They usually kill their hosts with their gluttony and are the cause of most normal undead infestations."

"That's how I felt right after my joining," Alistair joked, and I laughed. I probably would have laughed at anything, actually. Nerves.

We repeated the cautious door-opening procedure over and over, room after room of dormitories for the apprentices, mostly unoccupied except for a few shambling corpses similar to the ones from Redcliffe but freshly dead. Evidently their hunger demons had killed them already, but drove them ever onward in search of flesh. When we completed the circuit and approached a set of double doors leading to the center room on this floor, Wynne stopped us with a word of caution.

"Before us is the kitchens," she warned. "Doubtless the hunger demons will have congregated there, and likely also in the cafeteria upstairs."

"I want to take a peek. I promise I'll run away if anything sees me, all right?" I said. Alistair opened his mouth to object, so I scooted off before he could grab my arm and stop me.

The kitchens looked like someone had tipped them upside-down and shaken them like a snow globe. The hunger demons had pawed through every cabinet and shelf, dragging out anything remotely edible and shredding it, gnawing on boxes and burlap sacks as well as their contents in a desperate orgy of consumption. The ovens had burned out, but not before someone had spilled a bag of flour and the white cloud had burst into flame and left a pall of acrid smoke. The occasional soft moan or shadowing movement told me a half-dozen or so of the wretched creatures were still in there, gleaning crumbs.

I slipped back up the hall to my friends, ignoring Alistair's momentary worried frown, and explained what I'd seen.

"Only six? No problem," Alistair said cheerfully, hefting his sword. "Let's get chopping."

And we did. I almost felt ashamed of myself for slaughtering these poor creatures. They wore no armor and carried no weapon but their claws, and were so bent on _eating_ us that they forgot they had to kill us first. I was glad of the twisted deformity of their faces, because it made it easier to ignore the fact that these abominations had probably been helpless children or young apprentices only a week ago.

When it was finally all over, we sat on the stairs up to the cafeteria for a break. I smoothed a little of the healing salve over some bruises on Alistair's wrist where the creatures had bitten him, hoping to prevent the swelling from causing the joint to stiffen, while he drained his water flask and mopped sweat off his neck.

"All right, one floor down," I said, screwing the lid back on the crock of salve and leaning back on my elbows. "How many more?"

"Nine," Wynne answered.

"_Nine?_"

"The top floor is just one room, though," she added, as if that made it all right.

"That's crazy. We don't have enough food for _that_." I heaved a sigh.

The next three floors, Wynne explained, belonged to three degrees of mages, increasing in seniority as they went up. After that came the library, two levels of classrooms and labs, the Templar garrisons, and the private offices of the highest-ranking members of the Circle. The top floor held the Harrowing Chamber.

"What's that?" I asked, and her face darkened briefly before she smiled a brittle smile.

"The Harrowing is a young mage's rite of passage. Before his or her Harrowing, he or she is an apprentice. Afterwards, he is a mage – or he is dead."

"They deliberately expose them to a demon to see if they can resist it," Alistair elaborated. "If they can't, the Templars kill them before they can become an abomination."

"Harrowing, indeed." I stood up to stretch before we had to fight again. I didn't want to stiffen up and slow down; we were in for the long haul, here, and had to manage our bodies' resources. Alistair followed my lead and began a sequence of motions that looked oddly formulaic, even ritualized.

"What are you doing?" I asked him, flexing my wrists.

"A Templar thing," he muttered, standing on one foot to stretch the opposite knee. "It's supposed to help you focus. I doubt it makes a difference, but I still do it because it helps keep me flexible, and it's kind of relaxing."

I stood behind him and started copying, eventually managing to tangle myself up and fall over into a pot rack with an absolutely deafening clatter.

"Obviously there is some skill involved," I said as Alistair helped me out of the pile of cookware and Wynne hid her laughter behind her hand.

We climbed the stairs to the second floor and barred the doors behind us, using both physical bars and Wynne's elaborate wards. This floor was almost identical to the previous, except its rooms were slightly larger and more comfortable. We hacked our way through each room's occupants until we arrived at the hanging doors of the cafeteria.

At least a dozen hunger abominations milled around in various states of decay, clustered in a feeding frenzy in the middle of the room – they crouched over the carcass of a Templar, bits of his armor lying scattered like nutshells where they'd torn it off to get at his flesh. We looked in on the scene with a collective shudder of revulsion, and were about to turn back and discuss strategy when we heard a weak cry of pain from the Templar – Stone's mercy, he was still alive!

Alistair blanched, horrified, then set his jaw and charged, roaring a battlecry to distract the creatures from their grisly feast, and Rocky and I chased after him.

Frantic claws latched onto Alistair as he blew through their crowd, gnawing at his armor, but he ignored the monsters that clung to him, forcefully dragging them with him the last few feet to the dying man's side before filling the air with blood and chunks of demon.

I circled his bloody maelstrom and ran to help Rocky, who was surrounded, having drawn the attention of too many with his delicious unarmored self. I fell to my knees, sliding on the slick tiles, and hamstrung two at once, not taking the chance that they would ignore mortal wounds and take too long to bleed out; they toppled backwards and Rocky exploded out through the hole I'd cut open for him.

Five-clawed hands had scored deep cuts along his flanks and shoulders, but he cared not a whit and whirled to take down another abomination, seizing its neck from behind and worrying it until it collapsed. I delivered a coup de grace to the two on the floor and opened another on my way to stand on my feet again, as neat as gutting a fish. Rocky finished the last one in time for me to look over and see the gore-covered Alistair prying a disembodied hand out of his visor.

"That is truly horrifying," I remarked, as though commenting on the weather. He grunted and simply jerked the helmet off, tossing it aside as he knelt by the dying Templar and started looking for a pulse.

To my surprise, Wynne hiked up her skirts and ran across the blood-slick tiles to crouch beside the fallen man. She slid confident hands along his body and muttered a lyrical incantation, somewhere between a prayer and a song, and blue-white magic flowed like glowing water from her fingertips.

Where her magic touched, cuts sealed, broken bones clicked together, and blood siphoned itself back into his veins. My mouth hung open in astonishment as she pried a dreadfully mangled forearm from the mouth of a dead demon and reattached it, the flesh smoothing and fingers straightening as life flowed into the dead limb.

I lost track of time, but it must have been at least an hour as we all stood around her in rapt wonder. Eventually I tore myself away from the unfolding scene to administer to Rocky. He bled from scratches all over but none seemed deep, and he wagged his stump tail when I patted his head in thanks. Alistair had gone back to trying to pry off the clinging dead hand in his visor; I took the helmet away from him and cut it out with the point of a dagger.

When the Templar gasped and jerked, returning to consciousness in a flood of terror, I bent over him to steady him, and Wynne drooped back to sit on the floor.

He blinked up at me, his eyes glazed with pain but very much alive, and reached up to touch my cheek as if to confirm I was real. I gave him a friendly smile. "Welcome back to the land of the living, my friend," I told him. "You're safe now."

He heaved a great sigh and let his head and hand fall back; his eyes closed and I looked to Wynne in alarm, but she waved me away from him and assured me he merely slept.

"You look like you could do the same," I said. "Wynne, that was ,,, _awe-inspiring_. Are you all right? You look exhausted."

She tried to stand but sagged back; Alistair quickly slung her arm over his shoulder and half-carried her to a chair. I uncorked a water flask and handed it over, and she drank gratefully. When she'd finished, she managed a smile and said, "I will be fine. I just need to catch my breath for a while."

We seated ourselves around the table and waited for a few minutes, but when Wynne laid her head down and began to doze, I realized we weren't going anywhere soon. Poking around the cafeteria, I scrounged some towels and used one to pillow the sleeping Templar's head and the others to gently wash his face and neck. Alistair knelt beside me and started unbuckling the mangled armor.

"Any idea who he is?" I asked, hoping he'd met the man.

He shook his head. "We have to get him to safety before we can move on. I'm not leaving him here to be someone's bedtime snack."

"Let's stay here long enough to take a good rest, and then I'll rig up a litter and you can drag him to Leliana and the others. I'll stay here and guard the stairs with Rocky and Wynne."

We finished our ministrations and relaxed back in our chairs with a sigh. Alistair tossed aside his gauntlets and busied himself digging bits of demon out of the joints of his armor.

"I'm hungry," I said after a while.

"We should save our food," he shook his head.

"Let's eat half now and half later," I decided. "That way we'll feel less hungry." I knew this from personal experience with empty larders.

We chewed on jerky and hardtack and looked at Wynne and the sleeping Templar. Alistair swallowed hard and sat silently for a long moment before saying, "I wonder what would have happened if we did this first, and brought Wynne back with us to Redcliffe. Maybe we didn't have to -" his voice broke, "- to murder Isolde after all."

"Don't play the 'What If' game, you'll always lose." The same thought had also occurred to me, upon first opening the warded doors and seeing that room full of pale faces, but a duster's soul has no room for regrets. If we sat down to think about all the things that had gone wrong in our lives, we'd never get up again.

"But..." He broke off, and I looked up and saw the tightness around his eyes and the way he'd pressed his lips together. I wasn't sure if he was more angry or sad, and even though the decision had been consensus, I really, _really_ didn't want him to try blaming me. That sort of resentment can fester. I wanted to say I was sorry, but would that sound like an admission of guilt? Sod it all_, _sodding blood mages, sodding _Greagoir..._

I reached for his hand, squeezed it and said, "After this, let's take Wynne to see the Arl. Maybe she can cure him."

He straightened up. "Yes! That's a great idea – she's amazing. If anyone can heal him, she can."

He sat watching her sleep, holding my hand in a death grip, for long enough that my fingers went numb and I was about to complain, before sighing and slumping back, letting go my hand to drape his arms over the back of his chair. "Sorry to dwell on it. It's just... I mean, I don't have much family left at this point."

"You're not dwelling. It happened not three days ago. Give yourself time." I surreptitiously massaged some life back into my fingers.

"Do you think we might go to Denerim at some point?" He asked suddenly.

"Why? I mean, I'm not much for Ferelden geography. We can go if you think we should. What is it?"

"It's the capitol city," he explained. "We could maybe find the Gray Warden headquarters, maybe there's some documentation or something. And there's good shopping there if we want better gear. And... " He hesitated. "And there's someone there I want to see."

"Oh?" He'd piqued my curiosity now. "Who? Some old flame? Have you left a trail of broken hearts all across the nation?"

He laughed nervously. "No, nothing like that. I just, I found out a little while ago I have a sister. My mother's daughter. Her name is Goldanna and she lives in Denerim and, what with the Blight and all, I'd hate it if I didn't at least try to warn her."

"Of course," I agreed instantly. He so rarely made requests, and this one sounded important.

"Thank you." He turned and smiled at me. "I mean it. You know I never met my mother. I'm hoping Goldanna could tell me what she was like. And, I mean, it would be nice to meet my real family."

When he said that, a flash of dread ran through my belly as I thought of just how monstrous 'real family' could be. Leske's pa comes to mind as an example. I hoped fervently that Goldanna would be more like Rica instead.

Wynne stirred, and lifted her head with a groan, rubbing her eyes. "Sorry," she mumbled.

"Don't be, you deserved a rest," I told her. "Alistair is going to take that man down to Leliana while we stay here and guard." She nodded, and I stood up to gather tablecloths, layering them and tying their corners together until we could roll the wounded man into them to be dragged without injury.

Wynne and I sat and stared over each other's heads while we waited for Alistair to finish his errand, feeling awkward. Finally I asked the big question: "How did you do that? Forgive me, I'm not well-versed in magic, being a dwarf."

She smiled slightly. "Healing has always been a talent of mine, but recently it's become much more than that. With the thinness of the Veil here, I've come into contact with many more spirits from the Fade than the more aggressive ones that we know of as demons. In truth there are spirits of all aspects of man, including love, hope, and faith. These spirits work through me to heal wounds more grievous than a mere human mage could hope to mend."

"So it's both a talent and a skill?"

"You could say that." I got the sense that she wasn't telling me everything, but we didn't know each other well enough for me to pry. We went back to staring politely past each other.

Finally a sound down the hall brought Rocky to his feet, a growl rumbling in his cavernous chest, but it turned out to be Alistair and we prepared ourselves to ascend to the third floor and meet whatever new horrors awaited us.


	20. Tranquil with a Capital T

Well, it turned out the "new horror" was pride abominations. Apparently, the second-tier mages were arrogant enough to attract a better quality of demon. Hooray.

Hunchbacked and hideous, they slunk through the halls on oddly elongated legs, their long, bony arms tipped with spidery clawed fingers like the hunger abominations, but their massive, muscular shoulders gave them the strength to throw me right across the room, which I discovered the hard way in our first encounter.

The beast swung its warped, eyeless face towards Alistair and I pounced, sinking both blades in its back and twisting them – this was before I'd learned how fast they were, or else I'd have slashed and dodged instead, _before_ the brute could whirl and elbow me in the chest with such speed that I smashed through a wardrobe against the opposite wall, sliding down its back to lie gasping and tangled in a pile of robes. It knocked the breath out of me and gave me an impressive bruise, but the springy wooden doors absorbed most of the impact and Alistair hacked at the beast's shoulders when it tried to lurch after me and finish me off.

Then we got another nasty surprise when the it sagged limply to the ground and gave up the ghost: Its misshapen body lay dead for an instant and then, without warning, burst into bluish flame that billowed out to fill nearly the entire room, leaving only a pile of ash and two very disgruntled Gray Wardens.

The padding under Alistair's leg armor caught fire and he hurriedly doused it from his water flask; the broken, swinging door of the wardrobe I'd fallen through more or less shielded me but I still got scorched boots and burns up both calves. Rocky, who'd gone to check on Wynne and was thus mostly out of range, nevertheless had markedly shorter whiskers now than he'd sported moments before. I pulled out the burn lotion and got busy.

"Well," I said, finally retying my bootlaces. "This may call for a change in tactics."

Alistair looked up from inspecting his disintegrating under-armor padding. "What do you have in mind?"

"I think we should inflict bleeding wounds and then run away. When it bleeds out, we'll be far enough away that it won't burn us when it explodes."

He grimaced and waved his longsword. "I'll try, but this isn't the most precise weapon."

"Chop off arms and legs," Wynne suggested with a wolfish grin.

The corpses of hunger abominations lay scattered on the floor throughout this level. I suspected the pride abominations had killed them or driven them off and was glad of it. Alistair and I leaned our heads into a room and saw our next foe pawing feverishly through its host's book collection, scattering them across the floor.

I gave Alistair a "shush" gesture and darted across the floor on silent feet, stabbed it in the upper back with both daggers in search of lungs, and immediately turned and ran. Alistair slammed the door shut behind me and we leaned on it as the monster hammered its fists on the heavy wood, listening to its coughing howls as they slowly weakened, then ceased. The thump of a body falling was quickly followed by a roar as its death-fire immolated the room. I hoped none of those books had been valuable.

We made it to the Templar armory and found it surprisingly intact, probably because the heavy steel door was locked and bolted. It took me several minutes and cost two broken lockpicks to open it, but eventually the door swung ponderously inward and I straightened with a satisfied smile.

Once inside, Wynne found kaddis for me and helped me to inscribe fire-retardant runes across Rocky's coarse brown fur, to protect him from future fire-bursts.

"You know, if you'd asked me a month ago what I'd be doing today, I would not have said 'Making demons explode,'" I commented, putting the finishing touches on Rocky's kaddis before looking over at Alistair, who stood staring at the racks of enchanted Templar armor. "Do you think you should trade in your armor for some of the Templars' stuff?"

He thought about it. "That's not such a bad idea. Normally, of course, that's forbidden, but who's going to complain?"

"You realize, though, I'm going to have to make fun of you for wearing a dress," I warned, eyes twinkling.

"You're just jealous. You only _wish_ you looked this good in a dress," he teased.

I put a hand to my mouth and widened my eyes in a great show of surprise and hurt. "You don't think I look pretty in a dress? But... But I thought..." I sniffled theatrically.

He blanched, horrified. "Maker, no, I didn't mean – I – you're not serious, are you? Tell me you're not serious."

I removed my hand so he could see my wicked grin, and he breathed a sigh of relief. "You're a cruel, cruel woman," he accused, turning to the racks of armor stands against the wall.

"You know you love it."

I helped Alistair pull off his own armor and buckle on a heavy full-plate Templar suit, adjusting the dozens of straps and laces that held it and its thick horsehair padding in place. When we'd finished I stepped back and folded my arms.

"That stuff weighs a ton and you look like you're wearing a castle," I told him as he settled a helmet onto his head. "Can you even move?"

"It's not as bad as it looks, the weight's really well-distributed," he said, his voice echoing hollowly from the imposing helmet. "I'm more worried about getting hot. It's a furnace in here."

"Let us know if you want a break. We don't want you dropping dead of heatstroke, you're way too heavy for us to drag out of here," I warned, only half in jest; heatstroke was a major issue in Orzammar and our berserkers' handlers had to keep a close eye on them to ensure they didn't drive themselves to death in their frenzy.

And with that, we continued our circuit of the third floor and progressed to the fourth. It contained even fewer demons, only a few pride abominations, but they were fast and clever. We picked up a few more scrapes and bruises and I sprained a wrist when one spun quickly after I'd just stick a dagger in its ribs and didn't let go in time, but Wynne fixed it up quick.

We finished in the bath room, and after securing the room, I explored it a little, admiring the plumbing that funneled hot water into a dozen individual bathtubs. The largest had a sign on it indicating it belonged to the senior mages, and I poked my head inside and discovered a vast array of soaps and lotions, laid out on a carved table below a mercury-glass mirror. I unscrewed the top on a pink bottle and sniffed it.

"Rose!" I exclaimed, taking a deep breath of the delightful fragrance.

Alistair came up behind me and picked up another bottle, gave it a sniff and grimaced, putting it down quickly. "Sandalwood," he grunted. "Not my favorite."

I read the label and apparently it was perfumed hand cream, so I pulled off my gloves and rubbed some on. "I smell like a Queen," I told him, pleased.

"What do you mean?" he asked, falling noisily onto a slatted wood bench and pulling off his helmet for a swig of water.

"Our Queen loved rose oil. All the noble ladies imitated her. They left a trail of rose in the air when they walked through the Commons," I said dreamily.

I was remembering stepping into the air through which a lady had passed in order to breathe the scent, and then I thought how good it would be for Rica to have this lotion when she finds her nobleman, and all at once a wave of sorrow flooded over me, filling my lungs. I tossed the bottle back on its table and dropped down to sit on the bench, hugging myself miserably.

"You know, roses are a flower," Alistair said, oblivious, but when I didn't reply he looked down at my face and frowned, turning slightly to face me. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I muttered automatically. Then I changed my mind and said, "I miss Rica. And Leske, I guess. And I miss Orzammar, even though it was a hard place to live. I miss having a damned _clue_."

"We're going back eventually, for the treaty," he said, leaning his shoulder against the wall and offering me the rest of his water.

I shrugged. "I guess. Eventually." I didn't want to go back yet. I didn't feel ready to face being street trash again, especially not in front of my new friends.

"Why am I even here? I don't know anything - I feel useless and stupid," I burst out finally. "It's my nature to jump in and grab the wheel, but I don't even know where I'm going."

For a flaming instant, I was furious with Alistair for not being a strong leader, for leaving this power vacuum that I couldn't help but try to fill. It wasn't fair – I was the one who got dragged from her home and thrust into an impossible situation, _he_ should bein charge.

"You're not useless and stupid," Alistair protested predictably, and I made an irritated sound. _We're going to sit here until I say it's time to go_, I realized, _even after what I just said. He's just going to mouth platitudes until I take over again. Oh, he'll advise me, he'll make suggestions, sure - _If_ I ask him to_.

Rocky plopped his jowly head into my lap and gave me his gift of slobber, gazing adoringly into my eyes as he panted and drooled in the demonic heat. When I leaned over to hug him I became aware of Wynne standing just outside the door, giving me a critical look, and just like that, I went from being mad that Alistair trusted my leadership to being mad that Wynne didn't.

"Eh, I'm just tired and hungry," I said with finality, starting to get to my feet. "Let's eat the rest of our food and take a break. We've got … oh, Paragons protect us, we've got five floors to go." I dropped back again with a groan.

"Eventually we are going to have to take a real rest and get some sleep," Alistair said as he crossed to the sink and started refilling his water flask..

I nodded. "That's not good news from the food perspective, but I don't think we can get around it. If we push too hard, we'll get sloppy, and that's how people get killed." I took a deep breath and got up again, shouldering my pack. "Let's see how we feel after a snack and a break."

Not much better, as it turned out. We chewed and stared into space while sitting on the stairs to the next level, leaning back on our elbows and trying to relax. Wynne attempted to make conversation, and asked us how Ostagar had gone – she'd been sent home the night of the battle out of concern for her safety, and then been sealed up in the Tower before news had reached her of the outcome. That topic did very little to raise our spirits, and, judging by her reaction when she realized that the fate of Ferelden rested in the hands of two desperate young recruits with goofy senses of humor, it didn't raise hers much, either.

"Well, let's not keep the demons waiting," I said eventually, heaving myself to my feet and offering Alistair a hand up.

"Yes, they get really cross when their schedules get messed up," he said, jamming his helmet back on. "They like to plot their whole week out in these little planners," he went on, his voice echoing hollowly. "Only it's hard for them because they keep catching on fire."

"I can see how that would make them irritable," I agreed as we braced ourselves behind the door and prepared to open it and meet whatever lay beyond. "I should talk to them about using slate tablets instead. Maybe we've been wrong about demons all this time – maybe they just need better stationary and they'll be perfectly content and not homicidal at all."

He chuckled briefly before pushing the door open slowly with the face of his shield, tensed and ready, but the room beyond lay empty and silent before us. A long desk stood in the center, stacked with books, and a massive card catalog covered the entire far wall from floor to ceiling. A small plaque on the desk announced that we'd entered the library's circulations room, and warned us to return books on time or face disciplinary proceedings.

We'd all entered the room and were about to open the next door when we heard a rolling sound, as of wheels on the stone tiles, and Alistair thrust Wynne behind the desk and raised his shield while I ducked behind him, just before the door swung open and a middle-aged man wearing simple gray robes and a serene expression pushed an empty trolley into the room.

Wynne stood up to greet the man and Alistair lowered his sword, but I grabbed his arm and hissed, "There's something wrong with him! Look at his face!"

"There's absolutely nothing wrong with him," Wynne snapped. "What a rude thing to say."

"Be at peace, sister," the man said, his voice a calm monotone. "I am not offended. Indeed, how could I be?"

"Listen to him talk!" I tried to drag Alistair backwards, away from the man who was so horribly _off_. "He's not all there – he must be mad!"

"He's not mad, he's Tranquil," Alistair told me, as though that explained it.

"Tranquil? You're damned right he's tranquil! He's the tranquillest tranquil man that ever was tranquil _in the middle of a demonic infestation_! You don't think there's something wrong with that?" I was looking from Wynne to Alistair to the incredibly creepy man with an expression or stunned bafflement.

"Tranquil with a capitol T," he explained. "They're always like this. It's safe."

"The Tranquil are a treasure to the Circle," Wynne said, and I heard the affection in her words. "You recall the Harrowing? A young mage whose training has gone poorly or who doubts their ability to survive the Harrowing may choose instead to become Tranquil. They are separated from the Fade and cut off from all emotions, by which a demon might find entry into their minds. Their sacrifice gives us an invaluable ally who is completely immune to all demons, as well as lyrium, enabling them to work enchantments and survive magical environments that would kill a normal human."

"Tranquil indeed," I mused. "That doesn't sound so bad. No grief, or fear, or anger ever again."

"No happiness either," Alistair pointed out. "No joy. No love."

"So why hasn't some demon eaten him yet?" I asked.

"Demons fear us," the man replied. "They do not understand what we are, and so they stay away. I have been continuing my duties. There is much to be done. Many books have been damaged, and there is smoke and dust everywhere. The other Tranquil have been helping. Have we done well, sister?"

"Very well, dear," Wynne told him, patting his hand. "Thank you. You may rest if you like."

He shook his head. "I am not tired. There is much to be done." And he began stacking books on his trolley.

"If demons fear them, shouldn't we bring them with us?" I asked, watching the peaceful librarian speculatively.

"No!" I looked up at Wynne, surprised by her emphatic tone. "The Tranquil are to be protected and cared for. They are not some human shield for us to hide behind!"

"Okay, okay, I didn't mean anything by it," I said hastily, waving my hands. "But at least they could rest with us when we sleep, right? Their presence will keep the demons away, and they'd be safer resting with us than by themselves. Then they can go back to dusting."

"Fine." She didn't look happy about the idea, though.

We did a cursory sweep of the library, but found nothing but contented Tranquil going about their business. Then we prepared to enter the next floor, which Wynne told us contained laboratories and classrooms.

The outer ring of this floor contained no living creatures of any kind, only the occasional scorched and mangled body. Most of the doors hung open and the contents of the classrooms and labs, supplies for classes and spell components, had been gathered up and moved somewhere. Finally, Wynne beckoned us over to give us a whispered warning.

"I believe the lack of minor abominations means an intelligent one has moved into this floor and taken steps to keep others out. We should expect traps, and a powerful adversary, probably a magic-user."

"Well, that's just peachy," Alistair grumbled. "And here I was worried this would be too easy."

"We'd better move together instead of letting you go first," I told him. "If you're ten feet in front of me, I might not see traps until it's too late."

We moved as quietly as possible, hoping to sneak up on the monster, though nothing could completely stifle the clank of steel on stone.

"Sssh!" I scolded after a particularly loud footstep on the polished marble tiles.

"I'm trying, but I'm at a bit of a disadvantage here," he whispered back.

The sparkling magelights, recessed into shallow alcoves in the ceiling, provided excellent lighting and made my usual brand of stealth impossible. On the other hand, they revealed the tripwire stretched across the main hallway quite clearly. I couldn't see the trap's mechanics so I just clamped and cut the tripwire.

When we'd completed our circuit, we concluded that the monster had moved into the largest laboratory/auditorium used for lectures and demonstrations; three of the four doors had been blockaded. I inspected the fourth, muttering curses to myself that the one broken magelight in the entire floor just happened to be right over the door, casting an annoying shadow where I needed to see.

_Duh_, I realized, and looked straight up. The lighting alcove right over the door contained a large glass vial of something purplish-green and ominous. I couldn't see any wires anywhere, probably because the trigger was on the other side of the door – no need to place it out here where I could disarm it easily.

"Alistair, can I sit on your shoulders?" I asked, pointing up at the vial. "I need to reach that."

He nodded and crouched so I could climb on, then stood under the alcove. I examined it for a long moment. Wynne conjured a magelight of her own for me, and I muttered a distracted thanks. I didn't like the conclusion I was coming to.

With a resigned sigh, I pulled out my lockpicks and hoped I wouldn't break them all. The vial was held in a sort of mechanical claw, under pressure from a spring that, when triggered, would crush the delicate vial and rain its contents down on the head of anyone dumb enough to open the door without checking for traps first. I couldn't reach the spring, or the trigger, or the wire; I began wedging lockpicks around the claws, propping them open one at a time until the fist-sized glass vial dropped into my hand. The trigger went off and the claws snapped shut, breaking half the lockpicks and flinging the others across the hall.

"What are you going to do with it?" Alistair whispered, crouching again so I could slide off.

"Throw it at him," I whispered back, grinning evilly. He grinned back and we made ready to open the door; I stood behind him with my free hand on Rocky's collar.

Alistair nudged the door open and it revealed a tall, gaunt figure in elaborate robes bent over a laboratory desk strewn with beakers and gaslights; clouds of multicolored smoke rose from whatever it was doing. Mounds of spell components lay in rows on the floor according to some sort of insane pattern, and towers of books rose teetering from every surface.

Without further ado, I stepped out from behind Alistair and lobbed the delicate glass bottle at it, hearing Wynne's gasp of shock and belatedly realizing that perhaps tossing a volatile liquid into the midst of an ongoing magical experiment wasn't the best idea.

The vial smashed against its back and oily smoke curled out as the potent acid – for that's what it was, apparently – eagerly consumed its clothing. It turned with a hiss, and I froze for an instant at the blazing hatred in its eyes, literally glowing from deep within a face so cadaverous, it was barely more than a skeleton. With an irritated flick of its hands, it tossed a fireball at us.

I ducked behind Alistair's shield, but Rocky tore himself free from my grip and lunged, such that when the fireball detonated, he was on the side closer to the arcane horror; its blast hurled him teeth-first at the skeletal figure. He struck its shoulder and ripped long gashes through its robes and flesh as his momentum swung him around, paws flailing and scrabbling for footing and sending glass flying from the desk. The horror responded by releasing a crackling sheet of electricity, and Rocky stiffened and fell to the floor, twitching.

As soon as the billowing flames subsided, we ran to join the fight, and as we ran, I saw Alistair's eyes set into an expression of absolute concentration. He raised his sword and slashed at the fiend, and though the strike opened what looked like a minor flesh wound, the creature shrieked and threw itself backwards, knocking more glass and bubbling liquid from its desk.

When Alistair raised his sword again, the blood coating its tip mingled with a glowing blue liquid that sizzled as it ran along the blade. The desperate creature raised its hands, and a ripple of force flew outward in an expanding circle; I recognized Morrigan's mind spell and braced myself, but instead of the stunning blow I'd expected, I felt only an odd buzz as the spell slid over my skin and fell away. Alistair, however, staggered and overbalanced himself, landing hard on one elbow with his shield stuck underneath him and shaking his head dazedly.

Expecting its spell to work, the horror had already begun to flee around the desk and get some distance between itself and its attackers, but as it passed me, I slashed at its thigh, tearing through the flapping robes and gashing the skinny limb beneath. It fell sprawling and tangled itself in its robes.

I jumped after it, ready to deliver a coup de grace, when it rolled over and flung a handful of purplish powder in my face from one of the piles on the floor. I coughed and choked, my eyes closing involuntarily while I wiped frantically at them, trying to clear my vision before we lost our advantage. I heard Alistair get back to his feet and run after it, and a snarl told me Rocky was up, too, before I managed to squint my watering eyes open again.

I chased after them, and this time Alistair's sword didn't even seem to touch the creature, yet it squealed and flinched and more blue liquid spattered across the floor. A few drops hit Rocky and he yelped and shook himself violently to fling it off.

For whatever reason, the creature now abandoned magic and attacked with its claws, scrabbling uselessly at Alistair's armor once before changing its focus and stabbing at his visor's eyeslit. He swore and jerked back, flailing at its arm with the edge of his shield, and it released him, turning to swipe at me with frightening speed.

I caught its blow with a forearm and, grabbing its wrist, I twisted and yanked it forward, forcing it to overextend. It stumbled but seized the opportunity to grab my knee, sinking its claws into muscle and sinew. I gasped in pain and my grip slackened for an instant, and it escaped, scuttling under my arm and away, Rocky in hot pursuit.

My dog caught up to it in two bounds, leapt gracefully into the air and latched his jaws onto its neck. With a crunch, the horror collapsed to the floor, dead.

"Run!" Alistair yelled, grabbing my arm, but my injured leg buckled beneath me and I fell, hanging helpless from his grip. Rocky looked up from his kill, confused, and started to trot towards us; Alistair heaved me up off the floor and threw me over a shoulder by main strength and took a step towards the door, and the body exploded.

It wouldn't have been so bad, except the demon's death fire ignited whatever it had been working on, the liquid now splattered all over the floor from the fight. Blue fire turned green and red with yellow sparks as all kinds of weird stuff burst into flames all around the room.

Rocky howled in terror and bolted for the door. I screamed and covered my face, cringing against Alistair's armored back even as the steel turned scorching hot against my skin. He braced his enchanted shield over our heads and strode through multicolored fire until I heard the door slam behind us and felt the cooler air of the hallway wash over us.

Wynne sucked air through her teeth in dismay, and I risked a look around. Whole swaths of Rocky's fur had burned off and left reddened, blistered skin, and my leg bled freely from five puncture wounds. Alistair lowered me to the floor and twisted off his helmet with a grunt, revealing a row of claw marks along his brow frighteningly close to his right eye, which was squinted shut – I suppressed a shiver of fear that something permanent had been done, and waved Wynne off when she bent over my leg, thrusting her attentions at him.

She tutted and slapped his hand away when he tried to rub his eye, prying it open and examining it carefully before handing him the salve and telling him to get to it. Evidently nothing serious enough to require her magic had happened, thanks be to the ancestors. She did the same to my leg, telling me bleeding cuts healed just fine with elfroot alone, and focused instead on Rocky. Skin healed and fur regrew like grass under her glowing hands, and Rocky panted happily as she ministered to him.

Finally we all lay breathing long, deep, relieved breaths on the cool stone floor, listening to the crack and pop of spell components exploding as the fire gradually died down. I washed my sore eyes with water from my flask, and asked Alistair about the blue stuff on his sword.

"Oh, that's magic," he said casually.

"Magic," I repeated. "You're telling me he was bleeding _magic_."

"Not bleeding exactly. It's a Templar thing. Mages have only so much magical energy, and the first thing they teach us is how to sap it. You saw he stopped using magic after I hit him the second time."

"Useful," I murmured.

"Speaking of useful, I noticed you didn't react to his mind blast. Is that a dwarf thing?"

"Yes, it's a _dwarf thing_. The ward curtains don't hurt me either. Don't ask me why."

"It's because of the low-level lyrium contamination in the water, the food, and everything else in the Undermountain," Wynne cut in. "Dwarves have evolved tolerance for lyrium from centuries of exposure, eventually resulting in completely separating themselves from the Fade as well as some degree of magical resistance."

"Right, it's an evolved tolerance... _thing_." I nodded sagely. "You wouldn't understand, of course."

"Of course," he agreed with a mocking grin.

When silence fell on the other side of the door, I stood carefully and tested my leg. It stung, but it would do. I opened the door with the others hovering behind me, and revealed a scene of blasted devastation. In the middle of the char-broiled lab desk, however, lay a leather-bound book with no apparent damage aside from old age.

I approached it and the carved symbol on the cover, a leafless tree, stirred a memory somewhere; I remembered the brief glimpse of Morrigan's grimoire I'd caught back at the Redcliffe Inn. I wrapped the book carefully in a scrap of scorched leather and stashed it in my bag to show to her later. It made sense that a witch's grimoire would be fireproof, and I suspected she would be very interested in the contents of such a book.

Alistair was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, but I shook my head in response to his inquiring look. "I think now is a good time to rest," I said.

"What, here?"

"If you want, but we could go downstairs to be with the Tranquil just as well. Look – that door's trapped, too." I pointed to the explosive powder kegs packed against it. "If anything comes through it, it'll blow up, unless there's a really good rogue. Like, an awesome rogue, really good with her hands. Sexy, too."

"Oh man, all we've got is you, we'll never get through," he said in mock dismay, and I threw a chunk of charcoal at him.

We trooped downstairs and talked to the same Tranquil we'd met before; he seemed to be a sort of head librarian. In the end, Alistair and I dragged mattresses from the dorm rooms up to the library's study hall, and laid them in rows to accommodate the ten or so Tranquil living in the Tower, plus our own party. Various Tranquil agreed to keep watch in shifts, and I flopped gratefully onto an empty mattress and sank into sleep.

When I awoke, the first thing I noticed was an odd sensation of radiant heat, like reflected sunlight – subtle, but definitely there. I thought of demon fire and sat bolt upright, instantly awake, but saw nothing except the others around me stirring; no doubt their movements had been what woke me.

I looked for Alistair but he'd already gotten up and left, so I pulled on my boots and leathers and started following the heat. When I bumped into the wall, the stones felt cold under my hands. Mystified, I followed the wall until I came to a door, and went through it to see what weirdness could project heat through a wall without warming the stone in between.

On the other side of the door lay the broad corridor that circled the library, and as I entered it I saw Alistair come out from the washroom, toweling his hair. He let the towel fall around his shoulders, his damp hair spiked up every which way and turning his welcoming smile boyish.

"Do you feel that?" I demanded, holding my hands out like a blind man and feeling along the wall. "There's some sort of warm _thing_ in here. I want to find it."

I brushed past him following it, but then the warmth swung around behind me – I must have passed it.

"I think it's really close," I said, turning around and waving my hands vaguely, but he just stood there like a lamp, lighting up the whole hallway with his huge grin. I frowned at him, wondering why he wasn't more concerned, and suddenly figured it out.

"It's _you_!" I cried, pointing at him. "It's that Warden thing!"

He held his arms over his head like a performer who'd done a neat trick. "Ta-da! Told you you'd get it sooner or later."

With a cry of delight, I ran to him and jumped up for a hug; my momentum spun us around and he laughed, squeezing me gently before letting me slide to the ground again.

"Now we can get serious about our Hide 'n' Seek Championship," I said gravely.

* * *

_A million thanks to everyone who's given me feedback, especially mille libri, without whom this chapter would be twice as long. A girl's gotta draw the line SOMEwhere._

_If you get tired of the dungeon crawl, wait for chapter 23, "Secrets." It's got love for Leliana, Morrigan, Carroll, and of course, our heartthrob ex-Templar._


	21. Waking Dreams

We strapped Alistair back into his armor and looked for Wynne, finding her giving new instructions to the Tranquil. When she finished we retraced our steps up to the arcane horror's lab, and I dismantled his trap before we began our next floor's search.

The slow, thorough search had become routine, the hack-and-slash blurring together by the end of the sixth floor, and I found I had to fight to pay attention after a while. Wynne was searching a classroom that had belonged to some important Mage High Poo-bah and I'd wandered off to look at some student graffiti on a desk when an unexpected tap on my shoulder almost sent me through the roof.

"_What_?" I snapped.

"Wynne's done, we can go now," Alistair said, flushing. "Sorry, but I did call you twice."

"You did? Oh." I rubbed at my eyes. They felt hot and tired. "Sorry."

"Are you all right? You look spacey." He waited while I took a long drag from my water flask.

"I'm okay. Just hungry, I think." I gave him a wan smile, which he didn't return.

"I can't do much about that," he said. "Except kill demons so we can get this all over with."

"I'll take that. Get killing, soldier."

Wynne stopped us for a conference, though, to tell us what she'd found. "You know not everyone who lives here believes in the Circle's mission," she began, fingering the embroidered hem of her sleeve in some agitation.

"You mean not everyone likes living under the Chantry's thumb in practical imprisonment," I said, some of Morrigan's feelings having left an impression on me, and she stiffened angrily.

"Some see it that way, yes. I do not. I believe the Circle and, yes, the Templars serve an important function – surely what you've seen here has proven that magic is dangerous and young mages require training and supervision."

I thought about Connor and nodded. "I see your point. What of it?"

Her face twisted in anguish. "I – I think all this was done deliberately. I think someone tried to overthrow the Circle."

Alistair gasped and I put a hand to my mouth. "Who?"

"I don't know yet," she said, wringing her hands. "But I found evidence of some sort of collusion between factions in the Tower. There's always been dissidence but – but we had no idea it was of this magnitude."

Alistair and I exchanged a long look. "Whoever did it might still be here," he said, voicing my own fears.

"He'd be a powerful mage," I said.

"A maleficar of the lowest order." He set his jaw and took a deep breath. "But not for long."

"That's the spirit." I slapped his back. "Let's kill us a maleficar."

The seventh floor belonged to the Templars, and I looked forward to seeing it, curious about how they lived. But when we entered it, through the stairway door that opened into the common room, all I could see was the slaughter.

"Oh, that's just unnecessary," Alistair groaned. His sword drooped until its tip hit the floor as he looked over the mounds of defiled corpses, all naked but for their hated Templar helmets and grotesquely mutilated.

I swallowed hard against the tide of nausea and suppressed rage. "Enough, let's go," I said, and strode forward briskly, knowing Alistair would leave off his horrified staring and chase after me.

But all we found on that floor was row upon row of training courts and barracks, devoid of any form of life and covered in enthusiastic graffiti written in blood and glowing lyrium.

"It looks like some angry kids got in here," I said after reading some particularly lurid descriptions of degrading sex acts, with illustrations.

"Is someone there?"

At the sound of that hoarse voice, trembling with exhaustion, we all four broke into a run and burst into the senior Templar common room (it had nicer couches) where we found a purplish-blue ring of shimmering force, very similar to the one Wynne had sealed off the apprentice quarters with but more transparent. Inside, a single Templar sat huddled on the floor, hugging his knees to keep from touching the walls of his prison.

"Cullen!" Wynne cried, running towards him, but stopped with a wince when she reached the edge of his cage, her hands outstretched to feel out the limits of the spell.

"Wynne?" He came slowly to his feet, clumsy in his weariness but obviously terrified of bumping into the force field – it must hurt terribly, I thought. "How are you still alive? I saw you die!"

"I am not so easy to kill," she said lightly, circling the cage, testing it.

"No, I saw you die," he repeated. "I _saw_ you die, over and over. I saw you torn to pieces."

I exchanged a worried look with Alistair. Something was wrong here.

Wynne frowned. "Torn to pieces? Certainly not."

"I saw them all die," he moaned, rocking back and forth and hugging himself. "Over and over. Uldred killed them, and the others laughed."

Wynne froze. "Uldred?"

Cullen's glazed eyes turned suddenly lucid. "Uldred did all of this! Uldred tore open the veil! He had dozens of people with him – he told them the demons had promised him power. Had promised them freedom. When he called them, they bowed down to him. They accepted the demons and lost their souls. The ones who refused, he took into the Harrowing Chambers. I can hear the screams even here. When he calls, no one can resist. When he calls... Oh _Maker_."

He clutched at his head and resumed his terrified rocking. "But I won't. I won't give in. He got all the others – gave them waking nightmares, tortured them until they gave in. But I won't. _I won't_." He turned his back on us and covered his ears, reciting the Chant of Light in urgent monotone.

Wynne left him and took us into the next room. "He's badly dehydrated and sleep-deprived," she said solemnly. "I believe I can break his prison, for it is I who taught Uldred the spell – I was a fool, it seems, but I can make some small recompense for my failure now."

"He fooled everyone, Wynne, nobody had any clue," I said quickly, not so much because I believed it but because I wanted to comfort her. I reached out to squeeze her hand, but she turned away and wiped at her eyes, her movements brisk and clipped as she crossed back to Cullen and began a familiar incantation.

When she concluded her spell with that same chopping motion, the prison wavered and vanished, but Cullen still stood wrapped in his own private hell, chanting rapidly under his breath and rocking in time to his words.

"Come on, dear, let's get you to bed," Wynne said gently, touching his arm, and he flinched violently.

"Desire demon! Do not taunt me with visions of freedom! I don't believe you," he spat, his feet rooted to the floor. "Wynne is dead. Everyone is dead."

"Cullen," I said then, coming over. "Look, I'm a dwarf. I can't be a demon or a maleficar or part of the Fade. See?" I stood next to Wynne so he could see the difference in our stature, and he blinked several times, trying to focus.

"Odd," he said. "That's new."

"I have water, real water you can drink. I bet no desire demon's given you real water." I uncorked my water flask and held it out, pouring a few drops on his hand for him to feel. Hesitantly, he took the flask and sipped at the water. When nothing bad happened, he reached out and poked my forehead as if to make sure I was real.

"Odd," he said again.

"Let's go, dear," Wynne cajoled, taking his arm; he tensed, then very carefully took a single, experimental step. Nothing happened, and he suddenly sagged in relief, leaning heavily on Wynne and almost knocking her over.

Together we led him downstairs to the thorough, if distant, care of the Tranquil; he greeted them with pitiful gratitude, and I saw something of what Wynne had meant when she said the Tranquil were a treasure – they were the only people here that Cullen knew he could trust completely, and in their hands he finally let himself sleep.

"Well," Wynne said as we climbed the stairs again. "That was certainly edifying."

"We know our foe now," I said. "And we know he's persuasive, and sadistic, and in league with demons."

"He must use mind control magic," Wynne said thoughtfully. "It's forbidden, of course, but that would explain quite a bit."

"Wynne, a message." A Tranquil jogged up the stairs after us, panting. "Cullen told me to say this to you: 'Another mage went through some time ago, another survivor. He had found the Litany of Adralla and it had protected him from Uldred. You should look for it.' That is what Cullen said."

"Thank you," Wynne said. "You may go back now." The man turned and trotted away.

"What's that?" I asked.

"A holy relic believed lost," she replied. "Legend stated it could be found in a secret compartment somewhere in the Tower, where she herself had hidden it before she was killed. It contains the sum of her research on defense against blood magic and mind control."

"Well then, sounds like just the thing," I said, starting back up the stairs. "Let's hope he's alive, or at least not all burned up."

We did our usual door-opening routine and found an elegantly-decorated floor devoted to the studies of the senior mages. Wynne led us quickly to Irving's study but slumped in defeat when it was empty.

"At least we haven't found his body yet," I told her, though it was scant comfort. "He might still be around, up there in the Harrowing Chambers."

"With Uldred?" she asked sharply, and I didn't have anything to say to that.

Most of these doors were locked, and I didn't bother to open them, not when nobody responded to my knock. We were in a hurry now, desperate to find that man and his Litany, and perhaps that was a mistake because we all went into the luxurious teacher's lounge in a group instead of scouting first and maybe if I'd snuck in alone I could have warned everyone.

Instead, when the heap of rags that lay in a comfortable armchair stirred and sat up, we all just stood around looking surprised, and its mind blast took out both humans and the dog in a single instant. I watched them fall and waited for them to get up, but after a few seconds, I looked down at Rocky and saw his chest rise and fall peacefully as he slept.

"What the hell?" I yelled, kicking Alistair's armored shoulder. "Get up!" But he just snored, and the stinking pile of rags sighed and heaved itself to its feet.

"Aren't you tired?" Its voice sucked all the air out of the room and sounded like dusty, ancient death. "Let someone else do the work for a while. You deserve a rest."

He did have a point. I _was_ tired, _very_ tired. Why did it have to be me who saved everyone? I'm just a lost duster. And it was totally unfair that _they_ got to sleep and I didn't. I swayed on my feet, struggling to focus, fighting it, but in the end, I was asleep before I even hit the ground.

"The Blight is over. Isn't it wonderful?" Duncan smiled kindly at me, reaching out to stroke my hair like a puppy. "Now we can rest."

"Huh?" I frowned up at him. "It's over?"

"Yes," he laughed. "I took care of it for you. I'm sorry you were so worried about me. I tried to get a message to you."

"But I saw you die," I said. This was too weird.

He laughed again. "It was all part of the plan. And everything went perfectly. We won, and you can come home with me and Alistair and all the other Wardens. Come, let's go. It's time to rest. You've worked so very hard. I'm very proud of you."

"Where is Alistair?" I asked, following him across the blank white ground towards nothing in particular.

"Oh, he's around. Don't worry about him, I'll take care of him."

"Where are we?" The blank whiteness stretched as far as my subterranean eyes could focus without a single tree or rock.

He frowned. "Do you not see the castle?"

"What castle?"

The whiteness jolted for an instant, a nauseating disjunction, and Duncan jolted with it. I heard a frustrated hiss.

"It's right here. Stone walls, a comfortable bed and a well-laid table," he said, his eyes hard.

I stared at him and something wasn't quite right. His face and body shifted and blurred for an instant, briefly becoming that of a bronze-haired young man, then a buxom dwarf woman, then a black-haired and stocky dwarf as the demon dug through my mind looking for something that would keep me quiet.

"Nice try," I said. "I can see what you're doing. Shoddy workmanship there, you know."

The demon, briefly visible as a hunched and flaccid humanoid, hissed again and disappeared, leaving me alone in the blank whiteness.

"Now what?" I wondered aloud. I could try to wake up, I suppose, but what had he said about Alistair? _Oh, he's around_. Were we in the Fade somehow? Was that possible for a dwarf?

"Suppose it is," I said, still talking to myself and starting walking again, aimlessly. "Suppose that I can be brought here, by something sufficiently powerful, even though I can't go myself. The Fade is a real place, right? Does it have geography? Is it real, or is it the product of our collective minds? Where am I going, anyway?"

I stopped walking. "If it has physical space, then Alistair should be, like, _right here_. Unless... Unless the space doesn't correspond to real space. If it doesn't, he could be anywhere. But we know it has dreams – illusions – like my dreams. So people's minds influence it. So do demons. This demon created something just for me. So it must not be physically real. It must not have space, not permanent space anyway."

I considered this. Did I even have a body here, really? What am I standing on? Are those _my_ legs? At that thought, for a horrible instant, I couldn't move at all. Okay, that was not good, forget that, what if I forgot how to breathe, would I die in real life?

I closed my 'eyes' and tried to feel the temperature of the air, focusing on my newest sense. For a fleeting moment I felt cold stone at my back and strong warmth to my left – I lay almost touching him, back in the teacher's lounge, but that wouldn't do me any good and I clenched my teeth, trying to hold onto the dream. The sensation faded slowly and was replaced by a more generalized feeling of warmth and gradually I heard children's voices, laughing and playing.

"Now, boys, don't hurt your uncle, he's not a tree." I opened my eyes quickly and saw a woman bent over a table, rolling pie crust.

"They're won't hurt me, we're having fun!" I looked around quickly and saw Alistair nearly buried under three little boys of various ages, all climbing on him like a jungle gym and laughing with joy.

He saw me, too, and beamed at me. "Latitia! I was just thinking about you – kids, look, it's Latitia. Can you stay for dinner? Goldanna's making mince pie, her mince pies are _so good_. These are her boys – there's more around here somewhere, we're all having _so_ much fun."

I frowned at him and the boys surrounding him wavered and vanished. He didn't seem to notice, striding over and enveloping me in a bear hug. "It's _so_ good to see you."

"We can't stay here, what about the Blight?" I said, trying to pull away.

"I don't want to, I want to stay here," he said, not letting me go. "Oh! You haven't met Goldanna yet! Goldanna, this is Latitia."

The pie woman turned and dropped a curtsy, and I gasped in horror. She had no face, only a wispy, flesh-colored blankness. Of course – Alistair had never met her, he didn't know what she looked like.

"That's not Goldanna," I whispered urgently to him, hanging on his arm. "Look at her face!"

"What's wrong with her face?" He squinted at her and shook his head. "I don't see anything."

"Exactly! There's nothing there!"

He furrowed his brow in obvious distress. "What's wrong? Why are you being so mean?"

"This isn't real, Alistair, it's a dream," I told him, trying to ignore the faceless monstrosity that had drawn closer, hissing softly. "It's a demon. It showed me Duncan and you know he's dead. Think – try to remember how you got here."

He frowned, trying to obey, and shook his head again. "I don't remember. Ohh... oh, no. I – no, I could have sworn we – ohhhh." He rubbed at his eyes, confused.

"Alistair, honey, it's time for dinner," the demon said sweetly.

"Go fuck yourself," I snapped, losing it when she reached out and touched my arm, her fingers deadly cold.

"_He's mine_," it growled, and I saw its hunched shape again under its glamour. "_He will stay and feed me. You may go, I don't want you. You're too much trouble._"

"Did you hear that?" I asked him, but he was swaying dazedly, looking back and forth from me to the illusory sister.

"We were in the Tower," he said slowly.

"We're still there," I said quickly, hoping to push his memory. "We found a demon and it blasted you, on the eighth floor. Remember?"

"_Enough_!" it hissed, striking me backhanded across the face. Its floppy arms couldn't really hurt me, but it still knocked me off-balance and I stumbled backwards. Alistair caught my shoulder and it seemed that was the last straw for him – he glared at the demon and the illusion vanished entirely, revealing its torpid form long enough for me to see its droopy, bloodhound face and sagging belly.

"_Fine! I can't be bothered!_" It threw up its hands and waddled a few steps before disappearing.

"That was really weird," Alistair said, staring after it, then looked to me in shock when his hand passed right through my shoulder. "Hey, where are you going? What's happening?" He tried again to grab my arm but his hand was as insubstantial as air, and then he was gone.

"OK," I said, alone again. "Let's hope he's awake and not dead. Now what? Do I go and find Wynne, or what?"

I began walking again, for lack of anything better to do, and after what could have been a year or maybe just a minute, the empty white Fade shimmered and became a twisted dreamscape, full of fantastical rocky spires and gravity-defying geography. I had time to look around and wonder whose mind had made this before a voice behind me said, "Ah, there you are. You've been hard to find."

I spun around and saw a mage, probably about forty years old, but the expression of hopeless depression on his face made him look twice that. "Who are you?"

"Niall. Like it matters." The mage drifted into a chair that formed itself underneath him as he sat. "I wouldn't have bothered to come, but I did feel some curiosity about a dwarf in the Fade."

"Right, you can move about in the Fade, can't you? As a mage, I mean." I walked closer and took in his tired, sunken eyes and the way his robes hung on him, several sizes too big; how long had he been trapped here?

He shrugged. "I suppose. Really, it's not worth the effort. I can't contact anyone except the sloth demon's other victims, and they are all busy with their own little dreams. I tried to escape, for a while, but it's all so hopeless, and I have grown so very tired."

"The demon released one of my friends because I annoyed him so much," I told him. "Maybe he will release you."

"I'd die if I woke up." He shrugged again, a gesture of eloquent despair. "Too bad. I was doing something important, I think."

Suddenly alert, I asked, "Did you find the Litany of Adralla?"

"Yeah, I think that's it. There was some evil mage. It all seemed terribly important at the time."

"It _is_ important! I was looking for you – we have to kill Uldred before he tears the Veil any worse. Do you still have the Litany?"

"It's probably still on my body. The sloth demon wouldn't have bothered to search me. He just wants to feed on our minds' life energy – to keep us quiet and sap our will for as long as he can. That's what the dreams are for." Niall shifted in his seat, a brief flicker of anger passing across his face, and the landscape darkened and became stormy for a moment before he lapsed back into his funk.

"I have two more friends in here. Well, one's a dog. Can you help me find them? Please, Niall, I'm begging you. I don't know how to move around in here by myself." I tried to grasp his hand but somehow couldn't close the gap between us.

"I don't know. I'm very tired." The darkness deepened and I felt a stab of fear – what if he died before I found Wynne and Rocky?

"Please try," I begged. "You still have a chance to do something important and valuable. It's not all hopeless yet. I swear, I will kill Uldred for you, you won't die for nothing."

He straightened a bit in his chair and tightened his hands into loose fists. "I will do my best."

And with a sickening lurch, the scene disappeared and I felt a sensation of terrifying speed and power before slamming to a halt in a bare stone room, doorless and windowless, like a prison cell.

Wynne knelt on the floor, cradling the limp body of a young apprentice, murmuring something that sounded like a list of names over and over as she rocked him like her own baby. More corpses of various ages lay scattered across the hard floor, and I swallowed hard. Okay, obviously these were not strictly wish-fulfillment dreams, but designed instead, as Niall had implied, to keep its victims from trying to escape. Well, Wynne was in no fit state to escape now, that's for sure.

"Wynne," I said softly. "Wynne. It's me."

"Leave me alone," she sobbed.

"Wynne," I said more sharply now. "Look at me."

"No. Let me mourn in peace." She buried her face in the boy's hair and wept pitifully.

I grabbed for her arm but found again that I couldn't touch anyone here except Alistair, the Stone only knows why, must be a Warden thing. "Listen to me! The man who killed them will kill more children if we don't stop him! Remember the little ones you left at the foot of the Tower! They're depending on you – don't you fail them now!"

She lifted her head, eyes blazing with anger. Good. "How dare you speak to me that way!"

"Will you sit here in self-pity while they die?" I demanded. "This is a dream, a trap! You're a mage, you know this is the Fade! Look!" And I deliberately waved my hand through her chest.

She gasped in horror, then looked about in panic. "What – Where – _Niall_?"

She started to stand up, but the body in her lap clung to her skirts and wailed, "Don't leave us, Wynne! We don't want to be alone."

"Give it up," I snarled at the demon, reaching through its illusion with ease this time and yanking its flabby arm, dragging it away from her. As soon as I touched it, Wynne scrambled to her feet, her hands clasped over her mouth. The stone room turned translucent, then shimmered into the same dreamscape I'd found Niall in originally.

"My word," Wynne said, smoothing her robes as she faded and became transparent. "Wasn't that interesting."

"Indeed," I agreed, raising an eyebrow. "You should write a paper on it when you wake up. Go on, now, Alistair's waiting."

"Maker be with you," her disembodied voice blessed me before she was gone.

Niall had collapsed to the floor, his head in his hands. I wished I could do something but I didn't dare wait even a moment, I had no idea how time was passing in real life and what if the demon killed him to stop me causing trouble? I was about to ask when I smelled fire and looked around quickly, fearing a demon or something.

A little ways away, though, a campfire burned merrily and a familiar figure sat beside it on a thick fur rug, stroking Rocky's belly as he basked in the warmth. _That's unsurprising_, I thought, striding towards him. _Does my hair really stick up like that in the back? I need a haircut for real._

Rocky lifted his head and barked a warning, but then his face filled with comical confusion and he came to his feet, growling uncertainly, looking from me to his illusory mistress and back again.

"It's me, good boy," I cooed. "Do you smell me?"

He sniffed the air, but the other me grasped his collar and said, "Rocky, she's lying! She wants to kill me! Protect me!"

He whined and cringed, trying to back away from us both, and I closed on the demon at a run and tried to pry its hand from his collar. It hissed and its illusion flickered, revealing its alien nature to my dog. Rocky's eyes widened and he bared his teeth in fury that a demon would dare threaten his mistress.

"No, don't!" The demon cried out, scrambling backwards, its illusion flickering rapidly in its terror. Unappeased, Rocky snarled and pounced, tearing at the fleshy jowls around the demon's throat and ignoring the sharp claws that sank into his shoulders and belly until, at last, it lay still.

With a lurch, cold reality came rushing back and I found myself lying on my back and looking up at Wynne and Alistair's drawn and worried faces. I sat up and looked around, and Rocky scrambled over to lick my ear.

"Good morning," Alistair said, smiling and sitting back on his heels.

"Where's Niall?" I asked, looking around, but then I saw him. He lay where he had fallen days before, his body desiccated and sucked dry of all life, and I sighed, sorry I hadn't been able to save him.

_Much love for you all, again especially mille libri as her assistance in tightening the Circle story arc is greatly appreciated. Also Eva Galana, Nithu, Fluid Consciousness, and **you**, mysterious reader. You hold a piece of my heart in your hands._


	22. The Litany of Adralla

I wasted no time in searching Niall's robes for the precious Litany, and found it rolled securely in a wooden scroll case. Wynne took the ancient text in reverent hands, gently unrolling the yellowed parchment to reveal the holy script within. I craned my neck to see, but to my disappointment, the writing looked like so many scribbles to me.

"We've been hearing some pretty dreadful noises from the Harrowing Chambers," Alistair said, offering me his water flask. "Uldred's in there, and it sounds like he has quite a few prisoners – holdouts like Cullen."

I drained the flask, feeling as dry as that parchment. "How long were we out?"

"No idea. Could be an hour, could be a day. Felt like only a little while in the dream but _man_ am I hungry." He smiled wanly at me. "Only one floor to go, though, before we can get us some dinner."

"Uldred is likely to try to use his most powerful mind control," Wynne warned. "I will read the Litany if he does, and it should protect everyone in earshot."

"All right," I agreed, opening my jar of liquid leather, determined now was the time to use it and smearing it liberally over my face and hands. Alistair pulled off his gauntlets and dipped his fingers in the jar, too. "We'll keep the fight away from you so you can read."

We paused at the top of the stairs for a final round of hand-squeezing and, in Rocky's case, head-patting, before bracing ourselves for the worst and shoving the massively warded iron doors open. The ward curtain zipped along my skin like all the others, but Rocky and Alistair winced as they passed through it, and Wynne gave a little shudder. The doors closed slowly behind us as we ascended the last stairs and came up into the deadly Harrowing Chamber. I gripped Rocky's collar, holding him back like a drawn arrow as he trembled with eagerness.

Blue and purple light shone in through the soaring stained-glass windows whose colors and shapes denoted yet more runic wards, sending their containing magic in broad sweeps of color across the floor, but, judging by the state of the mages in the center of the room, it wasn't doing much good. Uldred himself loomed over the prostrate form of an elderly man in stately robes, presumably Irving himself, flanked on both sides by yet more abominations. A few more mages lay huddled in varying degrees of semi-consciousness around the room, their faces a mask of pain and anguish.

"Will you accept the gifts I offer?" Uldred's voice throbbed with power, and Irving shuddered as its dreadful call washed over him. Then the doors finally clanged shut and the sound caused every head in the room to turn towards the intruders.

"Uldred, stop!" Wynne's command rang through the hall. "We have come to -"

"Get 'em!" I yelled, cutting her off, and released my dog, who shot across the hall to tackle the closest abomination to the ground, tearing out its throat before anyone else had had time to react. Its foul claws scrabbled weakly at his fur before it shuddered and went still, and by then, I had reached the second abomination, flame blossomed from the corpse beneath Rocky's paws, and the midden hit the fan.

Uldred bellowed with rage and drew himself up, glowing with power for an instant before his body began to swell and pulsate, limbs lengthening with sickening wet sounds, face stretching and distorting into a bestial muzzle filled with needle-like fangs and topped by hate-filled red eyes. Bony spines tore through his skin to bristle across his shoulders and down his arms and legs, dripping with his blood as he tore his own flesh apart in his magical fury.

"Behold my true form!" he roared as his skin hardened and darkened, and the sheer volume of his shout sent my ears ringing, but I had other concerns at the moment.

I'd reached the abomination first, which may have been a tactical error, because I found myself dodging claws and held at bay by its long arms until Alistair arrived and simply barreled into it shield-first. It tried to claw at him but its arm was caught against its body, and bone snapped as Alistair's shield bash connected. I sidestepped around to its injured side and stabbed, rewarded by a fountain of blood and air that told me I'd torn open its lung.

It swiped with its good hand at Alistair's head, jerking off his helmet before lunging, jaws agape, at his face. He pushed off against its body and got away with only a deep scratch across the side of his head. Furious, it threw the helmet at him, which glanced off the top of his head and momentarily staggered him. It lunged again to follow up its advantage, and I neatly buried both daggers in its exposed back, sending it stumbling past Alistair, who beheaded it just in time to turn to face Uldred in his final incarnation.

He reared at least fifteen feet in the air, his arms hanging to his knees, covered in spines and tipped with heavy black claws. He raised his fists in the air and howled triumphantly, obviously expecting us to be impressed. I spat at his feet, instead.

"You disgust me," I derided him, dancing back from his clumsy swipe. "You're deformed and revolting!" He tried again to grab me in his enormous, spidery hand, and I leapt out of the way, hitting the ground with my shoulder and rolling smoothly back to my feet, leading him away from Wynne and Irving.

"I'm going to put you down like a sick dog!" I continued mocking him, bouncing on my toes, ready for him to attack again, and he did – I hurled myself backwards and forced him to over-extend as he reached for me.

Rocky, in a classic move borrowed from his wolf ancestors, seized the moment to attack Uldred's hamstrings. He gripped the back of an ankle and his jaws sheared away a huge strip of _something_, but evidently Uldred's hamstrings weren't where they ought to be in a normal, non-mutated-abomination body. Uldred growled and kicked out, sending Rocky tail-over-head across the floor before he got his paws under him and came back for more.

Alistair and I both tried to take the moment of unbalance to get in under his guard. Whereas Alistair hacked mightily at Uldred's body, sword striking sparks off the impenetrable bone armor, I attacked his knee, wedging a dagger between scaly plates and getting a squeal of pain for my efforts. The knee buckled, and before I could even look up, iron bands seemed to lock around my chest as Uldred finally managed to grab me, the annoying insect he'd been trying to swat.

He lifted me easily off my feet and up to eye level, out of Alistair's reach. I couldn't even manage a scream of pain before his grip crushed the air from my lungs. I stabbed at his hand and wrist, but the leverage was bad and I didn't do enough damage to make him drop me before he brought back his other fist and punched at my face.

I got both arms braced over my head before it connected, but ribs cracked loudly as my tightly-clenched body absorbed the force of the blow, pain searing through my chest as sharp bone bit deep into a lung. Lights sparkled in my eyes and I threw up on him, a fact which later brought me some small satisfaction.

I heard a call of command from below while Uldred drew back his fist for a killing blow, and as I drooped limply over the massive fingers, I saw Alistair brace himself for Rocky to leap onto his back and launch himself from there directly into Uldred's face. My dog raked at his head and bit hard across his muzzle, ruining one eye and opening huge gashes before Uldred, shrieking in agony, dropped me to grapple with the new threat.

Alistair caught me before my head hit the floor and laid me down flat. I gasped and used my first breath of air to scream, spraying blood across his chest before Wynne arrived and he turned back to Uldred.

I heard a howl of pain from Rocky and shouts from Alistair as he hurled insults at Uldred, vile oaths that no good Chantry boy should know, trying to attract the monster's attention away from his vulnerable comrades, followed by a deafening crash of steel hitting the stone floor as Uldred obliged by smashing him off his feet, and all the while healing poured from Wynne's fingertips like a blessed waterfall.

Odd, itchy sensations shot through my body as bones slid back into place and flesh knitted. The pain faded to an ache and an intense weariness, and I stopped screaming as soon as I realized it was me making all the noise. Then she did something else – wove some sort of symbol in the air and punctuated it with a vibrant call to arms, and energy flowed through my body with shocking speed.

I felt invincible, and jumped to my feet, casting about for my lost daggers. One was still stuck in Uldred; I recovered the other from the floor and ran to rejoin the fight. I was dimly aware that I was far from fully healed and that I would pay dearly for this tomorrow, but first I would have to make sure there would _be_ a tomorrow.

Uldred was trying to batter down Alistair's shield wall, and succeeding – his mailed feet skidded backwards across the floor under each blow and he had dropped his sword to brace both arms under the dented shield. In my current state of elated invincibility, it seemed an easy thing to scurry up Uldred's spiny back like a rat and just go to town on him with my dagger.

As soon as the thought occurred to me, off I went. I ducked his backswing as he prepared another blow and hurled myself towards the back of his hips. I managed to grip some of the heavy bone plates and dragged myself to where I could get my toes in, too. I cut my fingers and knees on the sharp plates, but registered the injuries as something to worry about later.

Uldred didn't seem to know I was there. I guess his spines didn't have much feeling. Anyway, he stopped momentarily and turned to the mages, who had dragged themselves across the floor to huddle in a corner away from the fight. He hollered an incantation at them in his unbearable voice, trying to force them to submit to him, and the vibrations almost shook me from his back. Behind me, I heard Wynne's voice raised in exalted song as she countered him with the Litany of Adralla. It occurred to me to wonder why Uldred had stopped attacking, and I glanced past him looking for Alistair and saw him lying in a stunned heap against the wall, shield arm obviously broken.

I felt a warning twinge from my chest and realized Wynne's spell was wearing off, so I redoubled my efforts, scrambling higher until I reached the impenetrable forest of spines around his neck and started attacking any patch of skin I could find. He growled in more anger than pain, and tried to swat at me, but couldn't reach, his range of motion limited by his scaly armor. I tried to shake off the rising fog of pain and looked for a better opening, as a ferocious growl announced that Wynne had revived Rocky and sent him back into the fight.

Rocky tried to hamstring him again, attacking the same ankle, and succeeded this time. Uldred staggered and spun to face the new adversary, almost flinging me from his back as he fell to his knees. He bent low, reaching for the fleeing dog, and the reticulated plates along his spine opened up before me like a flower, and I let go my grip to plunge the dagger into his spine with both hands. The wound tore wider as he spun and struggled to tear me from his back until suddenly he collapsed, gasping for breath. Casually, I picked myself up off the floor, climbed over his twitching body, and cut his throat.

Rocky trotted over to investigate the corpse, and I saw the healing gashes along his flanks that Wynne had tended to with ointment. I was glad she'd used it instead of wasting her magic; Alistair was going to need her.

Speaking of whom – he had hauled himself to his feet and retrieved his sword, and now stood swaying a few feet behind me, his broken arm tucked into his baldric as an improvised sling.

"Astyth's ass, you look awful," I told him, frowning. The side of his head was matted with blood from the cut given him by the abomination, but of greater concern was his unfocused expression and glazed eyes.

"Y'look gorgeous," he said thickly, slurring his words. "We won? Yay!"

"Did you hit your head?" I asked, coming up quickly to help him sit on the floor.

He shook his head. "'Mhungry," he mumbled.

"I know, me too," I said gently, having seen the blood that had finally soaked through his armor's quilted padding to drip copiously from his limp fingers. I thanked the Ancestors that the Templar armor came off more easily than his usual stuff, and unbuckled the platemail from his injured arm as quickly as I could with trembling hands.

Inside, I discovered the worst open fracture I'd ever seen. I couldn't believe he was still even conscious, much less walking and talking and trying to fight, and I was very glad my stomach was already empty.

"Wynne!" I called, trying not to sound hysterical. "We need you!" She looked up from where she'd been fussing over Irving, and came running. I dug through Alistair's belt pack and pulled out the ointment, and was about to start smearing it around when Wynne grabbed my hand.

"Let me fix the bone first," she ordered, and began her work. I turned my head away - it was too awful - and cupped my hand over his eyes so he couldn't watch, either. He leaned on my hand heavily and I squirmed around until he could rest against me, ignoring my burning ribs. After several minutes Wynne took the ointment, and I risked looking at his arm. It bled freely but the bone was all back where it belonged.

She batted away Rocky's concerned attempt to lick the wound and expertly worked the ointment in, finishing with a tight bandage to support the bones until they completed their knitting. His eyes began to lose their blurry haze and he focused on me clearly, then sat up under his own power.

"Are you all right?" he asked, pulling the gauntlet off his good hand with his teeth and reaching out to wipe blood off my chin.

"Thanks to you guys," I replied, wincing as I levered myself into a straighter sitting position. "Ow. Did you see what happened?"

"I was pretty distracted. Tell me later – we need to get everyone out of here and let the Templars in, before the Veil tears any worse. It's really weak now."

Wynne returned, helping Irving, whose right leg refused to support him. Both their faces were drawn with fatigue. "We have to go - " she began, but I cut her off with a dismissive wave and concentrated on getting to my feet without passing out. Alistair, apparently still not working with a full toolbox, tried to help me up by wrapping an arm around my waist and lifting, and I gasped and felt suddenly faint.

"Sorry!" He realized his mistake and let go, and I fell to hands and knees, coughing up blood from the pierced lung, which I knew was necessary but had been trying to avoid because _by the Stone it hurt_.

"Wynne," I heard him say anxiously, "I don't think she's healed."

"She'll have to do, I have no more healing to give," came the exhausted reply, and I groaned, clinging to Rocky's muscular neck as he whined and licked blood off my face.

As soon as we could, we started back down the stairs, and not for the first time, I swore an oath of enmity against the person who decided mages should live in a tower. Alistair was occupied supporting the elderly and injured Irving and nobody else was in a fit state to help me, so I lagged farther and farther behind, stopping on landings to catch my breath because if I breathed anything deeper than a shallow pant, fresh pain flamed along my side. Rocky fussed and whined, but I couldn't think of any way to lean on him that wouldn't hurt worse, so I waved him away repeatedly.

As I plodded along the third floor hallway, dragging my feet and running on hand along the wall for balance, the toe of my boot caught on an uneven floor tile and I fell hard on my belly, hitting my chin on the floor with a grunt. I started to draw my hands and knees under me to get up, but my body had clearly decided to call in its debts and I wasn't going any farther today. Rocky circled, whining and nudging me.

"Go get Alistair, please," I said hoarsely, giving up and lying down again. I heard his toenails clicking as he galloped off, and pressed my cheek against the stone floor for the comfort of its solidity and coolness against my hot flesh.

After a few minutes I heard Alistair's distinctive clanking footsteps and turned my head slightly to look up at him. "Hi," I said. "I'm not as dead as I look, honest."

"That's good, because you look deader than Greagior's sense of humor," he said, kneeling beside me with a tired sigh. His face was gray with exhaustion, his eyes deeply shadowed.

He gingerly touched my shoulder, and when I didn't complain, tried gently to help me roll on my back. I let him do it and lay with one arm thrown over my face to hide the pain the movement had caused me, until I had to turn my head to spit out blood. He was fiddling with the buckles on his armor, swearing quietly as the task proved difficult to do one-handed.

"Are you trying to take it off? Is it safe?" I croaked.

"Templars will be here any minute, and it's not like either of us can fight anyway," he muttered, yanking hard on a leather buckle at his waist and managing only to tighten it. I lent him a hand – only one since I didn't want to try sitting up – and eventually got enough of them undone that he managed to jerk the top half off over his head and fling it away to crash into the far wall.

"Take that," he yelled after it.

"We showed it who's boss." I tugged on the belt that held on the leg armor and ridiculous kilt. "Let's get this off, too. Purplish-red is not your color."

He'd just managed to shimmy out of it and sat panting in plain tunic and trousers when a clatter of steel-shod footsteps announced the arrival of a Templar contingent, led by Greagior.

"What is the status of the Tower's security?" he demanded.

"It's nice to see you, too, Greagior," Alistair replied. "You're welcome, by the way."

The man gave a little twitch of irritation and turned to me. "Irving says you have destroyed Uldred and the insurgency, and Wynne tells me you have performed a systematic sweep of the building for demons."

"Yes, that's right," I agreed. "There's still traps and Veil weak spots and possibly small, hidden demonic things lying around, so I wouldn't let the kids back up here for a while. You should go all the way to the Harrowing chambers and deal with that hole in the Veil first."

Greagior nodded and directed most of his men up the rubble ramp with a curt gesture before turning back to us.

"You have done us a great service," he said solemnly. "To have saved Irving and so many of the younger mages – I would not have thought it possible."

"Wynne helped."

"She is a good woman," he agreed.

He bade us farewell and ran to help in the Harrowing chambers, but left a few men with instructions to bring us someplace safe for rest and healing. They led us, half-carrying me, to the assistant's bedrooms nearest the safe zone of the apprentice quarters, and left me and Rocky in one and Alistair in another a few doors down. They placed a guard outside our doors, gave us cheese and biscuits and elfroot tea to help complete the internal healing, and that was that until tomorrow.

* * *

_Boss fight! I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it, exhausting though it was. Effusive thanks for everyone who's read, reviewed, favorited, or even just thought nice things._

_New readers may be interested in the "Cliff's Notes" version of this story, which you can find at wellspringcd dot com. It'll get you up to speed right away if you don't have time to read everything at once._


	23. Secrets

Tomorrow morning, I woke after what felt like a year of sleep feeling vastly improved but still quite tender around the middle. I was also ravenous and quickly dressed to go out. On the other side of the door stood a helmeted, mysterious Templar guard and my much more personable _ex_-Templar companion, who descended upon me immediately with fussing and questions about my sleep and state of health.

"I'm fine," I laughed, brushing him away. "Just hungry. Have they set up the cafeteria yet?"

"I don't know, I haven't looked," he said with a straight face.

I put my hands on my hips and glared. "Liar," I accused, and he grinned.

"They made scrambled eggs and sausage biscuits," he whispered as if telling me a state secret, and we scurried off down the corridor.

When we entered the cafeteria, everyone in there stood up and applauded. Leliana ran and threw her arms around me, and babbled excitedly about having to kill a rage demon that had slipped past us until she noticed my grimace of pain and let go.

"Where's Morrigan?" I asked.

"She's staying at the Spoiled Princess Inn," she explained. "She said she was tired of the Templars not being able to make up their minds whether they most wanted to kill her or bed her."

I crossed the lake to the Princess as soon as I had satisfied my appetite for eggs and Leliana's for tales of adventure, leaving her eagerly lapping up Alistair's blow-by-blow account of his half of the battle with Uldred. The Princess stood dark and silent on the lake shore, however, and when I found its surly innkeeper feeding his horses, he said he hadn't seen Morrigan since she'd checked in. I asked Rocky to find her, but he tracked her to her room's windowsill and then gave me an apologetic look.

Deciding she must have gone flying and feeling a powerful surge of envy, I bade Rocky to stay in the room and climbed up on the windowsill, sidling along it until I could hop onto the gabled roof, intending to watch the sky for her. Of course, I had no idea that the roofing tiles were so brittle (half the buildings in Orzammar didn't even have roofs, why would they?), so when one gave way beneath my foot I flailed madly in total surprise before flinging myself flat, clinging to the treacherous roof with every square inch of skin.

A great black raven fluttered down to perch on the roof's peak, gripping the rail with heavy talons for a moment before shimmering into Morrigan's human shape. "Not your most graceful moment," she observed.

"No, not really," I said, trying not to panic as I lost traction for an instant and slid several inches until my ankles hung off the edge. "Care to lend a hand, or would you rather shovel my remains into a sack after I go splat?"

I wouldn't really go splat, not from this height, but I'd broken enough bones this week, thank you very much.

She pretended to consider it, examining her fingernails. "Indeed, it would be a shame to ruin my nails shoveling. Very well - " And she blurred back into a bird, flew to the windowsill, morphed human again and guided me as I slithered back inside.

Breathing hard and wincing as I carefully felt over my sore ribs, I explained, "I brought you something we found in the Tower, and Rocky said you'd gone flying, so I thought I'd wait for you up there. In retrospect, I should have lain down and taken a nap instead."

At the mention of my find, her eyes brightened and she straightened expectantly. I smiled and pulled the bundle of cloth out of my bag, unwrapping it to reveal the worn black leather of the ancient grimoire.

She gasped when she saw the cover, and for an instant I saw her without her layered defenses – the combination of awe and excitement, tinged with fear, made her look oddly vulnerable as she reached for it. Her fingers hesitated before touching the book, and I felt a shiver of magic flicker through it, as if it knew her. Then she snatched it and turned away from me, pawing eagerly through the crackling pages.

After a moment, she asked me distractedly, "Why did you bring this to me?"

"I thought I recognized the symbol on the cover from your own book." I climbed up on her bed and lay down gingerly to rest my abused body.

She looked up, eyes sharp as topaz, and I quickly explained, "I caught a glimpse of it in Redcliffe. I haven't been looking through your stuff, I'm not that stupid."

The momentary anger melted and was replaced with a guarded warmth. "'Tis my mother's grimoire. It was taken years ago, stolen by the Templars when they raided our home. We thought it lost."

"Well, I stole it back for you." I grinned at her as I wriggled on the lumpy mattress, trying to get comfortable. "Will you return it to her?"

She laughed then, another rarity, and her face glowed as she said, "Certainly not! I finally have a chance to learn the secrets she's hidden from me – from everyone, for hundreds of years."

"Flemeth is hundreds of years old? Wow!"

"Yes, I know not how." She frowned a bit. "That is one of the secrets."

She turned back to her new book, and I relaxed for a while longer, but the inn's bed really was not comfortable at _all_ and eventually I told her we would stay a few more days and I'd come get her when it was time to leave.

"Yes, yes," she muttered, waving a dismissive hand at me.

Disappointed, I beckoned to Rocky and plodded heavily down the stairs, but a loud bang from the landing above me gave me a start and I looked up quickly to see Morrigan leaning out through the door she'd just thrown open.

"Thank you," she said. "I... I am not used to such things. To gifts. Thank you."

I smiled warmly at her. "That's okay. You're welcome. Enjoy!"

I slept a great deal that day and the next, Alistair sleeping almost as much as our bodies struggled to catch up after repeated forced healing on an empty stomach. As we felt better, though, we joined in the Tower's recovery and reconstruction. Leliana and I spent most of our time dismantling the cunning traps used by the blood mages to protect their correspondence, an invaluable source of information for the Templars.

That turned out to be a lot of fun, and I enjoyed working with her; she had less experience in mechanisms and considerably less enthusiasm for the subject, but she was a good assistant and, as ever, filled up all empty space with happy babble that let me enjoy her company without having to work at it.

I didn't see much of Alistair the first few days, as he spent his time trying to help the Templars, but instead felt the odd sensation of radiant heat move around and get stronger or weaker as he traveled through the Tower. On the third day, however, he gave up in a huff, coming down to dinner in high dudgeon.

"They act like they have some sort of club that I'm not allowed in," he groused, ladling gravy over his potatoes. "It's always 'Step back, Alistair,' or 'Wait here, Alistair.' As if they forgot it was us who saved their incompetent arse – sorry," he added, looking askance at me.

"You know better than to think I'll be offended by the word 'arse,'" I sniffed. "Those sodding Templar motherfuckers don't have the balls the Stone gave a gravel-sucking duster whore, or the cunts wouldn't have needed us to save their thrice-damned asses."

This had the desired effect – namely, Alistair snorting gravy up his nose and turning bright red. I laughed at him and patted his arm, and we finished our meal quickly before we settled into the common room's comfortable couches to read until bedtime.

Alistair had unearthed an instructional tome on Templar technique, and we'd carefully replaced its cover with something more harmless; Greagior would have had kittens if he knew we were reading it. I was helping him to piece out what steps were necessary and what was just there for show, and he was very excited to start practicing as soon as we left and had some privacy.

On the fourth day, the only areas left for Leliana and me to sweep were the top floor and the Harrowing chambers. We found an especially good one in Uldred's study and saved it for last. When we settled in to work, I had to ask Leliana to be silent while I concentrated, and she grew bored and sulky because I wouldn't let her do anything but hand me tools. I didn't mean to hurt her feelings, but this was dangerous and I didn't want to risk her – or me – losing an eye if she made a mistake. When I finally sat back with a quiet exclamation of triumph, holding the delicate vial of acid I had extracted, she took it and started to pack up without a word.

I waved goodbye when she told me she would report to Irving herself "to spare me the trouble" and stood around feeling out-of-sorts for a few minutes, guilt mingling with frustration that she hadn't understood, before deciding to go down for an early-afternoon snack. On the way down, I passed the Templar's quarters and saw Carroll just inside their common room.

No matter what Alistair said about him, I felt sorry for the lad and thought he didn't deserve his fate, so when he smiled and waved at me, I went into the room and plopped down on the couch next to him. It was odd seeing him without his massive Templar armor and he looked years younger, almost boyish, although I knew he must be older than Alistair.

"Finally off ferry duty?" I asked, and he grinned and nodded enthusiastically before talking my ear off about having been allowed to help close the hole in the Veil upstairs. I found him just as fun and engaging as I thought he would be, lyrium or no, as long as I didn't pay attention to the way he leaned too close and laughed too hard, as though he'd had a few beers.

"And I heard you killed Uldred yourself and he was twenty feet tall," he concluded. "Did that really happen?"

"Well, he was more like fifteen feet, really," I said modestly. "And Alistair and Wynne and my dog were there, too."

"Yeah but _you_ killed him. You cut his throat! Maker, he must have bled a lot, a big guy like that. Why didn't you do it when you were here before?" he asked, and squirmed in his seat until he sat like a kid waiting for a story.

I grinned and told him about Redcliffe and the walking dead, glossing over Jowan's and Connor's involvement and instead saying the demon had inhabited a traveling apostate that we had to kill, and he appreciated the irony of having come _here_ for help. He was such a good listener I kept going and told him about the castle and how much I liked it, and about the party and learning to dance like a surfacer, confessing that dwarven dancing felt limited compared to what I'd seen here and that I wanted to learn more.

"You like to dance? I _love_ to dance," he cried, leaping to his feet. "I never get to dance here, it's so _boring_ stuck in the Tower, can I teach you to swing?"

"Sure," I laughed, and let him drag me around the room for a lesson that rapidly degenerated into climbing on the furniture, giggling, and being generally silly, until he scooped me up in both arms and held me too tightly against his chest.

"Put me down," I gasped, wriggling.

"But you're so little and cute, how can I resist?" He grinned at me and tightened his grip until it started to hurt.

I looked up at him, and his grin was a little too predatory, and I didn't _know_ him at _all_, and suddenly I flashed back to a long time ago when another man had held me just like this and said almost the exact same thing, and I _panicked_. I thrashed in abject terror, too far gone even to scream, and he dropped me with an oath. I rolled over on the way down, landed on my feet and fled, deaf to his fervid apologies.

I ran blindly down stairs and along halls, until I found myself outside Alistair's door without even realizing I had been following the warmth of his Warden blood. He was lying propped up on his pillow in bed, reading with the door open, but looked up in surprise when I stopped, panting, in the doorway. I hesitated for an instant, confused about how I'd gotten there, before darting in, slamming the door and jumping up on his bed.

"What happened? Are you all right?" He tried to hide his nervousness when I crawled between him and the wall and burrowed under his arm.

"Are you all right?" he repeated when I didn't say anything, trying to find someplace safe to put his arm and eventually resting it across my shoulder. He put his book on the floor, face-down so it held his place in a way that would make any librarian cry, and awkwardly patted my head with his other hand. I grabbed his wrist and pulled, demanding that he hold me properly, and hid my face tightly in the curve of his shoulder.

He waited, perfectly still, until my breathing settled before repeating his question yet again, and this time I answered. "I'm okay, I just – something scary happened, but I'm not hurt."

"A demon?" he guessed, and I shook my head. "Then what happened that was so scary? I've seen you spit at Uldred's feet and face ravening undead hordes with a _smile_."

I stiffened, and struggled fiercely with the shame that kept me silent versus the desire to tell someone_, anyone_ who would believe me, until he felt me trembling and said, "Ssh, you don't have to tell me now. Or at all, really, if you don't want to."

"I can't," I choked out, and he stroked my hair, a real touch this time instead of his usual 'oh no, a girl, what do I do' reaction. He feathered his fingers down to the nape of my neck and brushed his thumb over my cheek and it felt so good.

"It's okay," he murmured soothingly. "I don't really know much about you, after all."

I'm sure he was just trying to let me off the hook, and didn't intend to sound distant and insecure, but it made me feel bad anyway. I thought back on our conversations and realized I had told him next to nothing about what I'd been doing before I materialized in Ostagar and took over his life.

"I'll tell you something else instead," I said, and started talking about Rica and Bherat, and about the fertility problem and the burgeoning concubine trade, and how that meant Bherat had given my sister a chance to escape in return for a 'finder's fee' from her eventual catch and my services in whatever capacity he required. Alistair tensed angrily and I hurriedly explained that this meant I stopped treasure-hunting and started being a thug and, after I earned some respect, a performer of more subtle tasks like the interference at the Proving.

When I got the exciting part where I had to pretend to be a real warrior, I sat up so I could gesture more freely, and when he started getting interested in the fighting, I hopped off the bed to give him a blow-by-blow complete with mimed actions. He sat cross-legged and leaned forward on his elbows, an eager audience.

"And then he struck with his shield like _this_ but ha! I grabbed his arm and pulled him down, _bam_, and got away and then he swung his axe like _this_ and I cut his elbow like _that_ and - "

He gasped at all the right times and hissed when the last warrior attacked me from behind, cheered when I killed Bherat and actually misted up a bit when Duncan rescued me and I told him the conversation as I remembered it almost word-for-word.

"And we left right that minute and rode a cart down to Ostagar and there you have it, The Story of Latitia the Gray Warden," I concluded, and he applauded as I took a bow and felt much, much better.

"Wow, I can't believe you actually won the Proving," he said in a slightly awed voice.

"I didn't, that last guy beat me," I shook my head.

"But he attacked you from behind, and he was going to kill you and they had to freeze him to stop him," he reasoned. "Doesn't that disqualify him?"

I thought about that. "You know, I think it does. How about that – little old me, the best fighter in the entire city. Huh."

And then, while he was still gazing at me like he'd looked inside a plain brown rock and found a brilliant geode, and my tongue still had lots of momentum, I took a running start and tackled the original topic head-on.

"I was playing with one of the Templars and we were having fun but then he picked me up, and when I asked him to put me down he said 'But you're so cute, how can I resist,' and-" this was getting too detailed, and I wasn't ready for the entire story to spill out, so I tried to put the brakes on, "-and that reminded me of another time when someone picked me up and said the same thing, and that's what scared me."

I waited breathlessly for him to react. He raked his hands through his hair like he does when he's unsure, and I felt a stab of panic that he would ask for more explanation. Oh, Stone give me strength, he didn't get it. He didn't know what I meant and now he was going to ask _questions_, oh _no_...

"I know I'm not the sharpest sword in the rack – Morrigan's always reminding me – but I think I missed something. I've never seen you that upset. I'm sorry, I wouldn't ask except it seems important to you."

I groaned and pressed my hands to my temples, feeling like my head would explode. "I was twelve! He was one of Rica's customers! I didn't hide soon enough and he saw me and grabbed me and _what do you think happened next! _I was just a kid and I couldn't do _anything_ and Rica _let_ him because he was a regular and we needed his money and I bled for _days_ -"

I stopped to gulp some air before I passed out. "And I went to the Shaperate to have it recorded so everyone would know what he did to little girls and the Shaper called me a lying casteless slut and threw me out on my face."

There, that was it. That's the bad part, right there, the shame that had kept this memory so silent and hidden, and the reason I'd gone through my years-long short hair phase, terrified it had somehow been my fault after all and determined not to tempt that sort of beating again. I plopped back down on the bed and concentrated on not crying, my face hidden in my hands, for several long minutes.

"I … don't know what to say," Alistair admitted eventually. "Except that I am the biggest fool in Ferelden, and I'm incredibly sorry for being so."

I tried to laugh but whimpered instead, and cringed inwardly at how pathetic and embarrassing this entire episode had become. There are things you don't tell someone you're still trying to impress, and this had definitely been one of them. Yet, sharing this secret with someone I trusted and who I knew would not follow up with something like, "Well, yeah, but what were you wearing?" or "It's not rape if he paid you" had been oddly cathartic, and I hoped that, after a meal and a night's rest, I would feel lighter and freer than I had in almost a decade.

Alistair apparently had a sudden though, and with a sharp intake of breath, he exclaimed, "Maker's mercy, I pick you up all the time. I haven't been hurting you, have I?"

"No," I mumbled, and, feeling as limp and tired as a boiled noodle, gave up on my last shreds of dignity and flopped sideways to lean on him. "I trust you."

When he sat rigid as a statue, I added, "Believe me, if I don't like something, I'll say so – I'm not the sort to suffer in silence."

"That's true," he chuckled, shifting a little so my head was comfortable on his chest instead of balanced precariously on his arm. "I seem to recall a number of occasions when we've all received regular updates about the temperature."

"Stone take Ferelden weather," I burst out. "Do you know why I hate it? Orzammar is full of lava, that's why! It's frickin' _hot_! This place is as cold as a tomb!"

"But what a nice, big, well-lit tomb it is," he said. "Full of very tall people and very large furniture."

"You're enormous, you overgrown lout," I accused. "Look at this!" I grabbed his hand and laid it flat against my own, palm-to-palm. My fingertips barely reached his second knuckles.

"And yet you eat as much as I do. Good thing you get a lot of exercise, that's all I'm saying," he teased.

"I have a fast metabolism," I said serenely.

"Speaking of which, are you ready for dinner?" he asked, looking at the angle of the sunlight coming in through his narrow window.

"Yes, I – oh," I hesitated. "I don't want to run into Carr – uh - " I tried to salvage a way to end that sentence, but took too long.

"Carroll?" he demanded, stiffening. "Was it Carroll who was bothering you?"

"No," I lied instinctively, but immediately backpedaled and switched to damage control. "No, he wasn't bothering me. It wasn't his fault, I overreacted."

"He had no right to touch you at all," he insisted, starting to his feet. I made a pitiful sound and clung to his tunic, hoping he'd decide to stay and comfort me instead of hunting down Carroll. It worked; he settled back down with a frustrated huff. Then came a knock on the door.

"Alistair? Are you there?" Ye gods, it was Carroll. The man had the worst luck in Ferelden.

"What do _you_ want?" Alistair demanded, cold as ice.

"Um," the voice on the other side of the door hesitated at the open hostility. "Have you seen Latitia?"

I shook my head frantically. "I'm not here," I whispered.

"No," Alistair said grudgingly to the unfortunate Templar.

"Well, if you see her, would you tell her I'm sorry?"

I looked up at Alistair for an instant and then back at the door, and made a decision. I got up and opened the door.

"Hi, Carroll," I greeted the surprised man. "It's all right, I'm sorry too. Let's just forget about it, OK?"

He looked over my head and I realized Alistair was looming behind me and directing a look of flat hatred at the hapless man.

"All right, great, we'll all just forget it ever happened," he agreed hastily, backing away. "I'm glad you're not hurt. I'll – uh – see you around, then, bye!" And he scurried away.

"Do you feel better now?" I snapped at Alistair, who looked way too smug. He had the good grace to pretend to be ashamed of his display, and pulled his boots on before accompanying me to dinner.

We looked for Wynne and Leliana in the cafeteria, meaning to discuss bringing Wynne to see Eamon in the morning. I didn't see any need for us to linger here.

Leliana wasn't there yet, but she joined us right before dessert, bubbly as usual and pretending we hadn't just had a tiff. I was fine with that. I didn't think she was the sort of person I had to keep clear air with, not like Morrigan or Alistair who were each very sensitive in their own way.

To my surprise, when I broached the subject of leaving tomorrow, Wynne announced that she would be joining us, and promised to extract a commitment of aid from Irving before we left. Again, I suppressed my annoyance at her authoritative tone, because I agreed with her.

May the Paragons guide us both if we ever disagreed – I suspected it would be like the time the lava flow north of Orzammar burst from its channel and geysered onto the glacier we used for food preservation: Boiling stone, hissing steam, flash floods and no good outcome for anyone.

* * *

_Ah, we're finally out of the dungeon. This chapter marks a bit of a trend in the story towards greater emotional intensity, and I'm really nervous about it... so, although reviews are always thoroughly awesome, I would really extra super appreciate comments on this chapter so I have a better idea of what worked or didn't work (**especially** what didn't work). Then I can improve future chapters, and you get a better story – it's a win-win! :D_


	24. The Hidden Garden

_Thanks to everyone for their input! It is always thoroughly appreciated :)_

* * *

We collected Morrigan and Bodahn from the inn the following morning, the witch raising a frigid eyebrow when she learned we would be traveling with Wynne, the 'preachy schoolmistress.' She lagged behind the group and I dropped back to join her, wanting to ask her a question.

"So, Morrigan," I began.

"No good can come of a conversation that begins so," she said, and I laughed.

"You're probably right, but every now and then I get this unbearable urge to stick my nose where it doesn't belong. I was thinking about what you said about Flemeth – how she's so old. Is she really your mother if she's that old?"

"She is the woman who raised me, the only home I have ever known, and my childhood protector and teacher," she said stiffly. "To me, that makes her far more my 'mother' than whatever harlot squeezed me out of her wretched womb."

"Point taken." I walked beside her in silence for a while, but I felt like this conversation had been a net negative so far and didn't want to leave her mad at me. "So you've always lived in the Wilds? Is this the first time you've ever left?"

"I visited Lothering on occasion, for supplies and such," she answered slowly. "I had to learn so many things. How to bargain without giving offense, how to greet a stranger, how to refuse a suitor. And they are always touching each other! What is with all the touching? Why constantly try to take my hand?"

She said this last with an air of genuine bewilderment, and I wondered if Flemeth had never given her any affection as a child, or what, but some things were becoming clearer.

"People touch each other to make connections and establish trust and friendship," I explained. "When people try to shake your hand, it's a symbolic gesture to show you mean no harm and you trust the other person."

"So I gathered," she said dryly. "That does not mean I enjoy it."

Ah. I thought guiltily of the many times I'd gotten in her space, and when she lagged even further behind, I left her alone and jogged to catch up to the wagon where my presence wouldn't offend anyone.

During our stay in the Tower, the weather had changed, humid hot air blowing in from Antiva under a glazed sky. The sun beat powerfully down and Alistair took to walking on the shady side of the wagon, Rocky panting along beside him. I enjoyed the heat, though, and eventually stripped off my leathers to feel the sun warming my clothes against my skin. Leliana seemed to like it, too, changing out of her heavy Chantry robes and into a sort of tunic-dress combination that left her arms bare.

"I feel like I'm baking in an oven," Alistair grumbled when we stopped for lunch and he was briefly forced to venture into direct sun.

I looked at him speculatively. "Would you say you're more of a pie or a cookie?"

"Why do you assume I'm a dessert? Maybe I'm roast chicken."

"Chicken? You? You're too brave," I shook my head. "I declare your sweet self a strawberry pie, and that's the end of the discussion."

"Oh, that's real manly. I'll be sure to tell everyone you think I'm a pie," he chuckled.

"I'm not much of a baker. How do I know if you're done?" I peeled the padded chainmail collar away from his damp neck and prodded him.

"Andraste's grace, finally, fresh air," he groaned. I blew on the back of his neck to cool it, and he squeaked and wriggled out of my grip. "That tickles," he gasped, gripping my shoulder to keep me at bay, and I laughed.

Later, when the sun began to hurt even through my clothes and I crowded into the narrow strip of shade with the boys, Alistair tugged on my hair and said, "You're a pecan sandie."

"I am?" I remembered the little round cookies he'd identified for me at the party. "Why?"

"Because you're nuts," he said, thoroughly delighted with his cleverness. I tried to swat his arm but he dodged, laughing.

We made the journey back to Redcliffe in easy stages, resulting in our arriving later than usual, about an hour before dinnertime. Bodahn settled his mules into Redcliffe Inn's stables and we left to climb the hill to the castle, looking for Teagan.

He had installed himself in Arl Eamon's study for now, taking care of affairs for the man until his recovery. He stood and greeted us with courtly courtesy, kissing Wynne's hand, hugging Alistair, and distributing shoulder pats to everyone else before leading her without delay to Eamon's bedroom. Alistair followed him and the rest of us were going to ask the chamberlain about dinner when I saw Connor coming up the stairs, and waved them on so I could visit with him.

He greeted me with serious hazel eyes and informed me that his own bedroom had no carpet and he had been able to stack a much taller tower in there. I replied by describing the actual Tower that we had just seen, leaving out the demons and emphasizing its luxury, the kindness of its teachers, and the excellent cafeteria. After all, the boy would be moving there soon, so the more I gilded the Tower in his imagination, the better.

He responded to this information by rubbing his chin thoughtfully, and countered with, "Yes, but my tower is in my room and that Tower is two days' travel away."

"You make an excellent point," I conceded.

"Also," he continued with the slightest tremor in his voice, "I won't know anybody there, and my Mama says the Templars are not nice."

Had nobody explained that his mother wasn't coming back? Or had he refused to believe them? Never mind - I could assuage at least some of this worry.

"Do you think Alistair is nice?" I asked, and he nodded. "Alistair was a Templar for a little while, you know. So some Templars are nice. Also, I met a bunch of people while I was there, and you can tell them you're my friend and they'll be nice to you. You can say hi to Carroll, who's another Templar, and also a nice mage named Petra."

He nodded again, and invited me, with gravity suited for a formal ball invitation, to accompany him to his room and build more things with blocks. I accepted, taking his arm like a proper lady, and let him escort me into an adjoining room, where we built a tower that modeled _the_ Tower as best I could manage with only square and triangular blocks.

When we were placing the finishing touches, a blue scarf for the water and toy boat for the ferry, I became aware that Alistair had been hanging around outside the door for some time - the heat from Connor's grated fireplace had distracted me from noticing sooner. I hoped he didn't think I was ignoring him, and nudged the door open with a toe, since my hands were full of yarn that Connor was knotting into a sort of streamer to hang from the Tower's peak.

"Can I help you, good sir?" I inquired, echoing some of Connor's grave manner. I suspected Isolde had been preparing him as Eamon's heir; a shame he would never be allowed to inherit, being a mage.

"Why yes, my lady," he replied with a courtly bow. "If my man Connor can spare you, I had wanted to show you something."

Connor, clearly enjoying being taken seriously, gestured graciously towards the door. "By all means, milord."

"Sorry I didn't notice you earlier," I apologized as I followed him downstairs towards the front door. "We were very busy doing very important things, as you saw."

"Clearly," he laughed. "Far be it from me to interrupt these matters of state."

"He's quite the little lord, isn't he. Where are we going?"

"I want to show you something," he repeated, apparently determined to be mysterious about whatever it was. He brought me out into the courtyard, then on through a small door that passed under the castle's interior defensive wall, and into a hidden garden that I would never have suspected existed. Neat rows of thorny bushes with glossy green leaves rustled in the lake breeze, each bearing a different color of flower, some just beginning to bud and others in full bloom.

"Ooh, pretty!" I clapped my hands in delight.

"Do you know what they are?" he asked, rubbing the back of his neck nervously.

"Your new weapon of choice?" I guessed.

He laughed, pretending to square off with an invisible foe. "Yes, that's right! Watch as I thrash our enemies with the mighty power of floral arrangements! Feel my thorns, darkspawn!" Then he touched one of the open red blooms. "Sniff," he encouraged.

I sniffed, dislodging a furry yellow-and-black bug to nuzzle the flower's velvety center. "Roses," I breathed. "I'd never seen one. They're beautiful."

"I wanted to make sure you knew what they looked like before I - well, it's - " He stopped, raked both hands through his hair, then pulled a small book out of a pocket, leather-bound with the symbol of Andraste on its cover.

"What's that?" I asked, curious.

"The Chant of Light." He smoothed his thumb over the tooled leather. "It's more a memento than anything else. The arl gave it to me when he sent me away. But that's not the point." The book fell open to reveal something red pressed in its pages. He picked up the fragile thing and presented it to me on the palm of his hand.

"I was pretty sure you wouldn't recognize this, especially being pressed flat, if I didn't bring you out here first, and I've been wanting to give it to you." He said all this as quickly as possible, blushing furiously.

Give it to me? All right... I gently took it between thumb and forefinger and held it close to my face to examine it, before I recognized the smell. "Oh!" I exclaimed. "Also a rose! But so flat?" I looked up at him quizzically.

"Flowers don't last long and I wanted to keep this one and if you press them flat they dry and then they keep for basically forever," he mumbled, fiddling with the ties of his bracers.

"Good thinking." I turned it over and examining the way he'd pressed it so the petals stayed in their circular rosette shape - ha, now I knew what a 'rosette' really was!

"Oh, hey," I exclaimed suddenly, "you remembered what I said about the Queen, didn't you? Aw, you're such a nice guy."

I gave him a broad smile and he smiled back, ceasing some of his fidgeting. "I picked it in Lothering. There it was, in all that death and despair, this perfect red rose. I thought, how could something so beautiful exist in the middle of such ugliness?"

"Like gold in mud," I nodded.

He paused for a second before continuing his speech, which I was now certain he'd planned in advance. I hoped I hadn't messed up his delivery. "So anyway, I thought I would give it to you. Because, in a lot of ways," his voice softened, "I think the same thing when I look at you."

I blinked at him, then looked down at myself, all battered leather and bloodstains.

"I know what you're going to say, so _don't_," he said sharply. "I'm allowed to think you're beautiful and you can't stop me. I just - you haven't gotten to see any of the good part of being a Gray Warden. It's all been fighting and death and pain. So I thought, I should say something. Tell you what a rare and wonderful thing you are to find amidst all this… darkness."

Overwhelmed, I returned my gaze to the delicate flower in my hand, tracing the outline of a petal a fingertip.

He scuffed the toe of his boot in the soft earth. "It was just a stupid impulse. I don't know, was it the wrong one?"

"No," I stated emphatically, fingering the live rose now, trying to memorize the velvety softness of the sun-warmed petals, so my dried rose could reminded me of this later whenever I looked at it.

He was hovering and I realized I'd been keeping him in suspense. I wasn't used to having this kind of responsibility; the ease with which I could hurt him momentarily terrified me. Then the flip side also occurred to me, how easy and rewarding it would be to put that sunny smile back on his face.

I beamed at him. "No, it wasn't stupid. I like it. And I like your rose, and I like your garden, and I _really_ like _you_." I stepped closer and hugged him with one arm around his waist, the other cradling the flower protectively, and leaned my cheek on his armored chest, breathing his scent of steel, leather and woodsmoke.

Alistair heaved a sigh and wrapped both arms around my shoulders. I rapped my knuckles on his breastplate. "This is in the way."

"Yes, if we could just skip this whole awkward stage and get right to the steamy bits, that would be great," he laughed, sounding giddy with relief.

"Sounds good," I said cheerfully, tugging on his sword belt. "Off with the armor!"

"What? Oh, you've called my bluff, ha-ha!" He backed away, holding up his hands and blushing to his ears.

I released him, confused and worried I'd done something wrong. That wasn't what he wanted? Didn't all men want that? Dust Town men _required_ 'steamy bits,' or you'd never get a second date. But... Alistair was different in a lot of ways, which was, on the whole, a very good thing.

I decided to changed the subject. "What're we doing for dinner? Are we staying here tonight, do you think?" Food was always a safe topic.

"It's up to you, but I don't want to tire Wynne," he replied, seeming glad to return to normal conversation. "We wouldn't really save much time anyway if we left, since we'd have to make camp in a couple hours."

"Excellent. I'm going to set up camp in the bath instead. Oh - would you please continue to hold this for me until I have someplace safe to keep it?" I held out the rose, and he nodded and tucked it back into his little book.

I had started towards the door when Rocky arrived, snuffling the ground where he'd been tracking me down. He poked my belly with his wet nose and gave a happy bark, then picked up a stick and began prancing, taunting me with it.

"You have a stick!" I exclaimed. "I'm gonna get it! You better run!" I began stalking him and he crouched in a play-bow, then sprang away through the garden door. We pursued him around the outer courtyard until, as he rocketed along a wall, Alistair jumped out from an alcove and tackled him. The two rolled across the grass in a clatter and squeal of claws on steel, and he sprang to his feet again, holding the stick triumphantly overhead. Rocky shook himself and started leaping after the stick as Alistair waved it teasingly.

"Avast!" I cried. "Yon knave has stolen the prize! Prepare to be boarded, knave!" I scrambled up his armor, using the metal plates as finger- and toe-holds, and clung to his shoulders, reaching for the stick. But his arms were way longer than mine, and in all the shuffle, Rocky jumped, seized the stick, and galloped away.

"There's a moral to this story, I'm sure," I mused, hanging on his back with my toes braced on his belt.

"This is really uncomfortable," he said, wincing, and I let him shift me around until I was riding piggy-back.

"Let's go get our stuff from Bodahn and tell the others we're staying," I said, pointing imperiously towards the gate. "We've a good following breeze, matey, let us make haste."

"Okay, I've been meaning to ask you about that. Why in the world does a dwarf use pirate metaphors?" he asked, carrying me out of the castle and across the bridge.

"The head of the Dust Town crime cartel before Bherat went through a phase where he decided it would be cooler to be a pirate than a thief," I explained. "It caught on."

He snorted and giggled. "Wow, I have the most amazing mental image now of a crew of dwarf pirates, all wearing little bandannas and waving their cutlasses, on a wagon with a sail on it, marauding the Deep Roads."

"Yeah, well, the freedom of sailing the limitless ocean has a certain appeal to people trapped in the slums."

He shrugged, adjusting my weight on his back. "I think you lost weight at the Tower," he told me, sounded a little concerned.

"Yeah, I had to tighten a few buckles. Didn't you?" I finally accepted that he wasn't going to drop me, so I relaxed, draping my arms over his shoulders and resting my cheek against the back of his neck.

"Not that I noticed. You're still in the early stages of dealing with your Gray Warden-hood and need a lot of nutrition. Are you feeling all right? You seem cheerful enough."

I thought about it. I habitually ignored my state of health as long as I wasn't seriously wounded. "I'm actually kind of tired, now that you mention it. I guess it's good we're staying here tonight."

I made him put me down when the hill turned steep, and we collected our kits from the wagon. I got roped into a conversation with Bella and Lloyd about the Tower and we didn't leave for at least an hour. I must have been more tired than I thought, because I got winded on the way back up the hill.

When we got to the dining table Alistair pulled my chair out for me, which I didn't expect and almost fell over backwards. For a moment I thought he'd been playing tricks until I remembered something Rica'd said about "proper behavior." _The poor sod thinks he's courting me now_, I realized, and worried about what he expected from me, now.

Would he get all sappy on me now? Or stiff and formal? I hoped fervently that he would get all this courting business out of his system quickly, and then we could go back to normal, except with more cuddles.

The kitchen served a sort of pie filled with peas and ground meat, satisfying and comforting, followed by a dessert that had strawberries in it - I recognized them, and also the biscuit sandwiching them, but not the fluffy white stuff on top. After poking it with my spoon and tasting it, I pronounced it excellent.

When I'd finished my treat, I stared hard at the empty plate, seriously considering picking it up and licking it. I hadn't yet seen anyone do that, so probably it was considered rude, but maybe it was worth getting the raised eyebrows just this once. My thinking was interrupted, however, when Alistair picked up his still-full dessert plate and set it down on top of my empty one with a clink. I looked up at him but he leaned back in his chair, hands clasped ultra-casually behind his head, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Okay, maybe courting wasn't _all_ bad, if it meant extra strawberries.

At that moment, Wynne came into the dining room and sat at the place we'd saved for her, and instantly everyone focused on her, hoping for news. "Hold your horses," she said. "Let a woman eat. I'm famished."

After she'd gulped down some water and a few bites of meat pie, she sighed and sat back to give us an update. "The good news is, Arl Eamon is in no immediate danger. The spell placed on him by the demon has essentially put him in stasis; he will be preserved indefinitely, as far as I can tell, until we break the spell. I would advise we not do so until we have the means of curing him."

"And what is that?" Alistair asked intently.

"That's the bad news," she sighed again. "There's no known cure for this poison. Had I been here when it happened, perhaps I could have healed him, but it has penetrated his entire body now and to release him from stasis would kill him in a few hours."

A groan of dismay rolled through the hall, but then Leliana's pert voice cut in, "What about the Ashes of Andraste?"

"Yes, the ashes," Teagan exclaimed. "Arlessa Isolde had sent many knights on a quest for it, but most have returned without success. Would they work, if we could somehow find them?"

Wynne looked doubtful, but Leliana insisted, "According to legend, the Ashes of Prophetess Andraste can cure any ailment of mind or body. They can bring a man back from the very brink of death and restore him to full health instantly."

"A legend," Morrigan scoffed. "We do not have time to chase ancient phantoms. We have real work to do, or have you forgotten the Blight?"

"A letter arrived about a week ago from Brother Genitivi, a scholarly monk whose research Eamon had patronized," Teagan remembered. "He said he planned to go to a village somewhere, he said he'd found a lead. He did not say precisely what it was and we have not heard any more news, but perhaps if we visited his office in Denerim, we could find some indication of where he's gone and start there."

"It's better than nothing," Alistair agreed, nodding.

"Denerim?" I asked. "What if Loghain is there with his army?"

At the mention of Loghain, a scowl passed across Alistair's face, but before he could say something fierce, Teagan interrupted. "Loghain is traveling the Banns trying to garner support. It's not going well; indeed, Ferelden lies on the brink of civil war. Many Banns do not believe his tales and refuse to follow him as regent, even though his daughter Anora is Queen."

I nodded. "In Orzammar, the Assembly would elect someone. I presume the Banns do something like that here?"

He grimaced. "Sort of. The issue has not come up since long before the Orliesan occupation, and the procedure is... messy. Besides, the Banns have no one to rally behind as an alternative. If Eamon were well, he could perhaps make a claim, having been Cailan's uncle, but..." He left it hanging.

"So it sounds like curing Eamon is more than a personal errand," I decided. "We need him to unite Ferelden. We can't have the country torn apart by civil war while the Blight creeps in like a thief. Alistair, do you know how to get to Denerim?"

"The West Road goes straight there," he confirmed, then had a thought. "It also goes near some of the Dalish Elves' migration routes. We could look for them on the way there and save some time."

"Excellent, saving time is always good. So! Tomorrow we leave for Dalish territory, yes?" I looked around the table and got a round of nods. "Good, then. I'm off - I want a bath. My hair is full of road dust, and I'm sore all over."

I extricated myself and went to my room to strip out of my armor before wandering, yawning, into the bath. My joints ached and I hoped hot water would help, but if anything, it just made it worse; after I'd finished washing my hair, I got out and dragged myself off to my room. Rocky trotted after me and jumped up on the bed, and I closed the door and crawled under the covers without bothering to undress.


	25. Fever

A light knock on the door, followed by Rocky's warning bark, woke me at some point late the next morning and I opened my eyes, which I immediately regretted. The light streaming through the window stabbed painfully and I realized I had a throbbing headache. I groaned and covered my face with the blanket and regretted that motion, too, because my body hurt almost as bad as my head.

"Are you coming for breakfast? Everyone else has eaten," Alistair called through the door.

"No." I didn't want to get up and the thought of food was nauseating.

"Are you all right?"

"No."

"Can I come in?"

"Okay."

He opened the door and Rocky jumped off the bed and ran through it, probably needing to go out. I felt the bed shift as he sat on its edge. "What's wrong?"

"I think I'm sick," I mumbled.

He pushed some of the blanket off my face to touch my cheek, and I heard his sharp intake of breath. "Maker, you're boiling. I'm getting Wynne."

"I want Morrigan."

"I don't know where she is. Why her, anyway? Wynne's the healer." The bed shifted again as he got up and went to pull the curtain over the window, darkening the room. I moaned with relief.

"Morrigan's got swamps," I told him. That wasn't right. "I mean sun. I mean herbs. Herbs."

I heard him sigh. "I'll be right back. Please don't try to get up while I'm gone."

"Leave the door open for if Rocky gets hungry," I called, my voice rusty.

He came back with Wynne and a glass of water a few minutes later, and she looked inside my mouth and eyes and asked me questions, which was really annoying because I was worried about Rocky and nobody would listen to me.

"He's not here," I insisted, pushing her hand away and trying to sit up. "He'll get hungry." I got dizzy and fell back, hitting my head on the headboard and gasping with pain. That shut me up for a while and Wynne talked to Alistair about - something, water, sleep, six days.

"And find her dog before she tries to find him herself," she concluded, and I relaxed. Alistair would deal with it. She lifted my head and made me drink some water, and then they left and I fell asleep.

At some point the movement of the bed woke me up again and someone lifted my head to make me drink something gross. I whined about its bitterness and where was Rocky and I want Morrigan. Wynne made an irritated sound and left again. Rocky licked my ear and I fell asleep.

Then the door banged open and startled me awake, and Morrigan was there, prying my mouth open to look inside and telling me to focus on her magelight as it moved back and forth. She gave a satisfied huff and stood up. "How long did Wynne say? Six days?"

"At least." Alistair was there, too, somewhere.

"I can have her on her feet in two," Morrigan declared smugly. "I must fly in search of ingredients, but will return in the morning."

"Thank you," I croaked, and she left.

Alistair leaned over me, shooing Rocky away, and gathered me up in my blanket onto his lap. Then he carried me down to the lavatory and set me on my feet and left with the blanket until I was done and called for him. He bundled me back up and put me to bed.

I hung onto the collar of his tunic. "Rocky's hungry," I told him intently.

"Are _you_ hungry? I think you're hungry," he said, gently prying my fingers off. Leliana said she would get soup and ran off. I hadn't noticed she was there. When she came back they ganged up on me and made me drink it, and then Wynne showed up with more bitter tea and I was really pissed off by now and shouted for her to leave me alone. When she ignored me I burst into tears but she wouldn't leave until I drank her stupid tea.

When I woke up later I blinked a few times and my head didn't explode, so I risked looking around. All three of them had dragged chairs into the room and were sitting around reading. Rocky dozed on the rug. The light glinting around the curtain had turned golden so I knew some time had passed, and I was hungry and thirsty and needed to pee. I scooted myself up into a sitting position leaning against the headboard, and they all looked at me.

"Hi," I said. They all said hi back, and Alistair got up and laid his hand on my forehead. It felt cool on my skin and I pressed my aching head against it.

"I think your fever went down a little," he told me, sitting down and letting me lean on him. "Do you feel better?"

"I'm hungry and thirsty and I need to pee," I complained, feeling like a wrung-out rag.

Wynne said she was going to get me chicken soup. I didn't know what that was and I didn't want it; I asked for biscuits instead but nobody cared what I wanted. Leliana and Alistair helped me walk to the lavatory and back, and Wynne made me eat her miserable soup and insisted I drink the broth. When I appealed to Alistair not to make me drink it, he told me I should listen to Wynne. By the time I'd finished I was so tired I was near to tears and yelled something about the sun being too big and would it sodding go away and leave me alone.

"I think you're ready for more tea," Wynne informed me, and I groaned. I would have been more upset except she also brought back a bowl of cold water and a washcloth and washed my face. I tried to drink her accursed tea but after one sip I couldn't stand it anymore and spat it out, turning away and trying to hide against Alistair.

"Please try to drink it," he begged quietly, stroking my hair. "It did help a little. Please try."

So I did, eventually. Then they finally let me lie down. Wynne and Leliana left, promising to bring dinner back for Alistair, who returned to his seat. After they left, I heard him get up again and push the curtain aside to look out the window and mutter, "Where the hell is Morrigan."

* * *

I woke up thirsty just before dawn and discovered to my complete surprise that Leliana had spent the night_ in my bed_. I supposed Alistair would have been too shy to do so, or maybe it's just not ever okay under any circumstances for him to sleep in my room, who knows. Regardless, I felt more alert and sat up under my own power, draining the glass of water on the bedside table before she woke up.

"Are you feeling better?" she asked, yawning.

"Yes." I decided not to comment on our sleeping arrangement. "I need a run to the loo."

"I'll walk you," she told me, and did, but I didn't need much help as long as I ran one hand along the wall for balance. When we got back I slept for a bit and then woke up around breakfast time, hungry and pissed off at still being in bed. Leliana said she would go look for Alistair to watch me so she could have breakfast and a wash.

I fidgeted, still sore, and couldn't find a comfortable position. Rocky wasn't in my room, and I couldn't reach any of the books without getting up, and I was bored of lying in bed. I was staring blankly at the tapestry on the far wall when Connor burst into the room, eyes wide with terror.

"Latitia, there are Templars in the courtyard," he panted. "I think they came to bring me to the Tower but they figured out Morrigan's a witch and things are getting bad."

"Why'd you come here? I'm sick," I asked, baffled.

"The guards are scared of the Templars and I don't know where Teagan is," he wailed, his lip trembling. "And you said you know some Templars and I thought maybe they would listen to you and I didn't know where else to go!"

"Okay," I said as I pushed off my blanket and sat up slowly. "I need you to help me down the stairs."

When I got shaky and tired just from descending the stairs, I realized I needed more competent help and asked him if he knew where Alistair was.

He nodded. "He's in the hayloft."

"What? Why?" This was getting weird. "Never mind, just go get him. Hurry." Connor ran off, and I walked unsteadily through the great hall and pushed open the front doors.

Outside, four Templars in full armor stood in a ring, swords outstretched, around the shivering, huddled form of my favorite witch. A fifth lay groaning on the grass, clutching frostbitten hands to his chest. That she managed to hurt even one of them was a testament to her ability, because these five knights had come here fully prepared for hostile magic.

"What in sod-all is going on," I yelled as loud as I could from my ravaged throat, stumping barefoot down the front steps and advancing on them across the courtyard. "Back off _right now_. Do you lot even know who I am?"

They turned their soulless, helmeted faces towards me but nobody said anything. I realized I looked pathetic, thin and bedraggled, so I drew myself up and informed them, "I am Latitia the Gray Warden and I just saved your collective arses. Morrigan was instrumental in saving the people _you_ failed to protect from the monsters _you_ failed to control. How dare you touch her!"

Stone give me strength, the sun was like a blast furnace. I'd emerged from the shadow of the keep and with my fever and no hat, its light was nigh-unbearable. I swayed briefly and tried to make up for my weakness with extra bluster.

"Back away from her at once! I will speak to Greagior about what you've done. I said back away!" I'd reached their ring of steel and nobody had moved, so I slapped at the sword arm of the closest one. "Put that away!"

"What the hell are you doing," came a tense whisper from over to my right, and I saw the castle's guards cringing in the corner. "Those are Templars! They'll kill you!"

I sneered at them and slapped again at the knight's arm, harder this time. "Put it away," I yelled, frustrated, almost knocking myself over. "Put it _away_!" I heard my voice rising into hysterical pitch and felt my legs tremble. They were so dumb and stubborn! Probably drunk on power and high on lyrium! Damned sun! Damned head!

"Please leave," I begged, sinking to my knees on the grass next to the catatonic Morrigan and clutching at my blazing head. A brief chuckle echoed hollowly from inside one of the knight's helmets.

I heard running footsteps and knew, to my intense relief, that someone else could take over now. I looked up and saw Alistair, who had somehow acquired a sword, and Rocky bounding along in front of him.

"That's Alistair!" One of the Templars cried in astonishment, recognizing him. "Andraste's flaming sword, is this really Latitia the Warden?"

"Are you blind as well as stupid!" I was shocked at how angry he sounded. I didn't think he cared that much for Morrigan. "After all she did for you, you ungrateful arseholes, you should be ashamed of yourselves! Get away from her or by the Maker, you won't live to see the sun set!"

Two of the Templars hissed and stood straighter, ready to retaliate, but the other two sheathed their swords and backed away, empty hands held up. "We honestly didn't recognize her, Ser Warden," the one with the tallest helmet crest appeased, gesturing curtly for the angry ones to back down. "What do you want us to do with the witch? She's passive now, but not for long."

"Let her go, she's with us," he said shortly, dropping his sword on the grass and crouching on one knee to pick me up. "Stay here and wait for Teagan."

He stood, pausing to shift his grip on me, and I squirmed until I had my face pressed into his shoulder, away from the blasted sun. "You - " I heard him call to a guard in the corner, his chest vibrating against my cheek. "Stop cowering and help Morrigan to her room. And you - go find Teagan and tell him what happened."

"Sorry," I mumbled as he carried me back inside. "I should have let you deal with it."

"Yes, you should have." He still sounded pissed so I shut up and let him deal with his anger by taking care of me.

He sat on my bed, holding me upright in his lap so I could eat from the mug of soup someone had left on my table. When he held the mug to my lips for me to drink the broth, I slurped at it willingly rather than risk upsetting him any more. Leliana was probably looking for me and I worried about that briefly before losing track of the thought in my murky brain.

Teagan stuck his head in to ask Alistair what in Andraste's name was going on, prompting a flurry of protective barks from Rocky, and while Alistair was scolding the dog and explaining things to the man, I slid lower in his arms and fell asleep, exhausted.

* * *

"What's this? Such sweetness in the midst of fever and Blight." Morrigan's dryly amused voice woke me and I knuckled my burning eyes. I was still draped over Alistair's lap but he'd moved over to lean on the headboard.

"Are you okay?" I asked. My throat felt like I'd been gargling gravel. I pushed myself off his lap to sit up and squint at her. She looked fine, but maybe paler than usual. "Why don't you ever sunburn? You're outside, like, all the time," I added. "You don't wear hardly anything. Your tits should be like two red beets, hee-hee."

"Sorry," Alistair cut in. "She's been pretty vague."

"Well, let us see what we can do about that. Here, drink." She thrust yet more tea at me. I grimaced, but it smelled different, less bitter but more sour. When I finished, she took the cup away.

"Do I really have to eat chicken soup?" I asked, hoping for a reprieve.

"What on earth for?" She looked baffled. "'Tis only soup. No, eat whatever you want, it makes no difference. Only sleep matters."

"I want biscuits and honey and butter," I challenged.

She shrugged. "Suit yourself."

"I'll get it!" Leliana had evidently been lurking in the hallway. I heard her run off. Morrigan left.

When Leliana came back, Alistair stood up with a jerk. "Where were you?" he demanded.

"In the kitchen?"

"I mean this morning! You were supposed to be watching her! If I'd known you were going to let her run off, I would have stayed myself."

"I was looking for you," she snapped. "Where were _you_, may I ask?"

He flushed and looked away, and she brushed past him to deliver biscuits. I ate one but the odd tea I'd drunk wasn't sitting well in my stomach. I squirmed, disconsolate, and finally reached out to tug on Alistair's hand. "Come back?"

"Uh-" He stiffened and looked at Leliana, shy again now that the emergency had passed.

"_I'll_ come," she said, jumping onto the bed and scooting next to me. Irritation flickered briefly in the dim recesses of my mind - Leliana was _not_ a substitute for Alistair - but I didn't have the energy to argue and I wanted cuddles. I wanted Rica to hold me and stroke my hair and sing to me like she did that time I drank bad water and lay in bed shivering for three days.

I curled up across Leliana's lap where she braided my hair and also told me a story about a rabbit. Alistair paced around the room a few times before flinging himself into his chair, evidently unhappy but I couldn't imagine why. When she finished my hair she took my hand and massaged it gently.

"I feel all noodle-y," I mumbled. "And my brain is a glazed donut."

She laughed. "That's descriptive."

"You're keeping her awake," Alistair said from his chair. Leliana's hold on my hand tightened momentarily and she shot him a glare, which he returned.

"Fine," she said, sliding out from under me. "I'll stay here and watch her. You go eat lunch."

"I'm not hungry. I'll stay." He leaned back in his chair and gripped the armrests pointedly.

She drew herself up for some sort of retort, but all this belligerence was beyond my comprehension and, frankly, annoying. "Everyone be quiet now," I ordered, covering my face with the blanket. "Sleeping."

That shut them up, and I did sleep, deep and long, waking up after dark to find them both still sitting there as though a glacier couldn't move them. Wynne was there too. I felt markedly better, the sharp pain in my joints and head gone, but the bone-deep weariness remained and now I was also ravenous. I sat up, appreciating that the room didn't spin this time.

All three of my guardians leapt up at once and collided. Alistair yielded to Wynne with the result that she sat on one side of the bed and Leliana hopped up on the other and they tag-teamed my forehead in search of fever.

"I wouldn't have believed it possible," Wynne said finally. "But the fever's gone."

"I am _so_ hungry," I told the room at large. "Where's Rocky? He would be delicious."

"I think there's more soup left," Wynne said, getting to her feet.

"No! No more soup! I don't like chicken," I stated, shaking my head. "Morrigan said I can have whatever I want. What did you have for dinner?"

"Meat pie," Alistair said. "Do you want some?"

"That's too heavy for a recovering patient," Wynne objected, but I overruled her, repeating that Morrigan had given me permission to eat anything I wanted and sending Alistair off for pie. Wynne dropped back into her chair, picking up her book, something with a title written in curly script and a drawing of a limped-eyed damsel in a fancy gown.

I ate my pie and it was delicious, then went down to the lavatory on my own and changed into fresh clothes and washed up. Rocky found me and sniffed me carefully all over before flopping down on the floor with a satisfied grunt.

"Did I pass inspection?" I asked him, kneeling beside him and stroking his sleek ears. He lay back and exposed his broad chest for me to scratch. I obliged him, ruffling his fur as I thought about the events of the past two days.

Wynne's ability to heal broken bounds and internal injuries, putting us back into battle in a matter of minutes, had been the main reason I'd agreed to bring her along. She was nice enough, too, and Alistair seemed to like her and respect her opinion.

But Morrigan had access to whole schools of magic not taught in the Tower, not just her herbalism, and with what I knew of the Chantry and its Templars, I was willing to bet that they forbade the teaching of any magic deemed too powerful to control. And Wynne didn't seem to know much - if any - battle magic.

I wondered, if Morrigan had been with us in the Harrowing Chamber, whether she could have forced Uldred to drop me by freezing his hand; then I wouldn't have needed my ribs reassembled, Rocky wouldn't have been hurt saving me, and Alistair wouldn't have had his arm crushed fighting Uldred alone.

I felt Alistair's approach and eventually heard footsteps coming down the stairs; he was leading Morrigan, who held a steaming mug.

"Here she is," he told her, and offered me a hand up.

"It seems your fellow Warden has other uses besides waving a large, phallic piece of metal around," Morrigan said with a crooked smile, handing me the mug to drink.

I snickered and drained the sour tea. When I was done, I said to Rocky, "Morrigan is awesome, don't you agree?" He woofed. I nodded seriously and said, "You're right, _super_-awesome is more accurate." She rolled her eyes.

I handed her the empty mug. "Wynne is fit to be tied," I told her happily, wanting to make her feel good. "She's personally offended that you cured me when she couldn't."

She lifted her chin as though too proud to care about such things, but I caught the unconscious motion of her hand smoothing her hair, preening herself at being praised. "You are not really cured, not quite yet," she admitted. "But you shall be by tomorrow. We can travel the day after if you promise not to tire yourself."

I nodded and started back up the stairs, intending to raid the Arl's library for bedside reading material. I was breathing hard by the time I got to the top but everyone was too polite to mention it.

"Seriously, Morrigan, are you OK?" I asked her before she could evaporate again. "I feel really bad for sending you out alone when I should have known there'd be Templars coming."

"You barely knew your own name, how could you know the Templars would already be coming for Connor?" Alistair said, defending me even from myself. I hid my smile in favor of a sincere, concerned look.

Morrigan tossed her head, causing her glossy hair to swirl. "'Tis I who should be embarrassed. Had I been paying attention, they would not have taken me by surprise."

"Still, I think we should be more careful in the future," I told her. "We've been being careless, taking you right into the Tower and leaving you alone in a nest of Templars, any of which might be too high or stupid to remember who you are. Not that you can't defend yourself," I added, when her brow creased, "but I'd rather spare you the trouble. And I'd feel just terrible if anything happened to you."

She was still frowning, so maybe I'd misinterpreted its cause. She asked, "What concern is it of yours if I allow myself to be caught in my own sloppiness?"

Taken aback, I answered honestly - more so than I normally would with someone as skittish as she. "I like you. I think you're awesome, you've got this whole mysterious untamed-power thing going on, and you can _fly_, and you made my fever go away. And you have great hair."

"Oh. I see." She blinked, looking at me askance and clearly caught off-guard. "Well. That is straightforward enough."

* * *

_This is embarrassing to admit, but I hate the story summary I've written for Great Escape and yet cannot think of anything better. If anyone has an idea of something a lttle less... middle school poetry, I'd be eternally grateful. I mean, more grateful than usual! Love and kisses for all my readers!_


	26. Foreshadow

We hung around Redcliffe for longer than I'd expected, because everyone ganged up on me and refused to leave until I'd gained back some of the weight I'd lost, what with the Tower and then the fever. I winnowed through the more interesting shelves of Eamon's library, hung around with the new kennel master and his pack of suspicious hounds, and, when Alistair wasn't busy experimenting with his Templar manual, we fished with a hand net off the docks.

"They're so pretty!" I cried, looking at our bucket full of rainbows and silver. "Cave fish are all white and see-through."

"They'll look even better on a dinner plate," he grinned, heaving the bucket into his arms to carry up to the castle.

I wouldn't have argued so much about the delay if I'd known that would only take a week, though, instead of the month or more it took to recover from such things in Dust Town. Whether the healing magic was still doing its thing, or whether Gray Wardens bounce back faster than normal people, we rolled out from Redcliffe in light rain, exactly ten days from when we'd arrived.

"How long will it take to get to the Dalish?" I asked Alistair from under my dripping hood.

"That depends on how long it takes to find a clan," he said from somewhere inside his own leather fortress – when he had his hood up like that, I couldn't see him at all unless he bent over. "They migrate with their herds of halla – that's a kind of deer, I think. They live in fancy wagons and travel all over. But usually there's at least a few around the edge of the Brecilian Forest, and that's where we're going."

"So how long will it take to get to the forest?" I thought of the mixed-wood forests I'd traveled through with Duncan. "Is it the same as the one up by the Frostbacks?"

"A week or so, and no, the Frostback forest is young. It's just what grew up in the past half-century or so, after the Orlesians burned it all down. The Brecilian forest is ancient – you'll know what I mean when you see it. Trees as big around as a house, that kind of thing."

"Have you been there before?"

He hesitated. "No... actually I haven't. But I've seen paintings, and heard carters talking about it in the stables. They usually sounded pretty impressed."

Again with the stables and haylofts? "Why do you hang out in the stables? Do you like horses that much?"

"Um..." he glanced down at me from under his hood and I could see him turning pink. "Sure. I like horses. They're... fuzzy."

"And the hay smells nice." I ducked my head as a gust of wind drove rain into my face.

"Yes." He sounded relieved. "Yes, it does." He sidled closer and gathered me under his cloak for extra protection from Ferelden's foul weather, resting one warm hand on my shoulder.

The rain persisted for the better part of a week, and when we turned off the Imperial Highway onto the older South Road, the inferior workmanship meant that muddy puddles often stretched across the entire road, filling our boots and hiding potholes and ruts that caught at Bodahn's wheels.

When we passed a sign announcing the village of Glendale, Bodahn called back to say we would be spending the night there. "I have to rest the mules," he explained, "And the left front wheel needs repairs. If she breaks on the road, we'll have a hell of a time getting her going again, if you'll pardon my Orlesian."

I nodded, thinking longingly about sleeping indoors again. The little village did have an inn, albeit a scruffy one that smelled like wet dogs and made the Spoiled Princess's mattresses look like royal eiderdown, but it was dry and the stew was hot.

The four of us, minus Morrigan who had evaporated as usual, were lounging around in the tavern area waiting for our clothes to dry when I noticed a small movement in the darkest part of the room, in the corner behind the bar. I yawned and stretched and made a great show of not having seen anything, and indeed, I saw nothing more for the next hour even though I was _sure_ a figure had ducked out of sight.

At first I was merely curious, but when the slight distortion in the darkness behind the bar persisted, I realized we were in the presence of a truly competent sneak. Most people couldn't hide from direct scrutiny, and relied on not giving others a reason to look more closely. My idle curiosity turned into dark suspicion as I waited... and waited... and still saw nothing but a shadow that wasn't quite the right shape.

Eventually, Wynne and Leliana excused themselves and headed for bed; Alistair watched them go, then tipped his mug towards him to give the the watered-down piss Glendale called 'ale' a disgusted look before pushing the mug away and leaning back in his chair with a sigh.

"Aren't you tired?" He rubbed gingerly at the back of his neck where his wet armor had chafed.

I smiled at him and said, lips barely moving, "I'm waiting for our friend the sneak to leave the shadows again. Don't look around, you'll spoil my ploy."

His eyes widened and he went rigid with the effort of not looking, and I groaned inwardly. He was _not_ subtle at _all_.

"Stop that," I hissed. "Act sleepy." And while I was criticizing my comrade's acting ability, my quarry zipped out through the back door.

"_Shit_!" I yelled, mad at myself, and leaped in pursuit, but the dark, wet street outside the door was as cold and lifeless as a tomb.

Rocky dashed past and stood in the rain, casting about for a trail to follow, but no scent remained in the ankle-deep mud. He slunk back to my side, ears flattened in apology.

"Aw, sod it all," I complained, shutting the door and tossing a coin at the innkeeper to pay for my dinner before starting towards the stairs. "I'm sorry, Alistair. I should've payed attention."

"Hey, I didn't even know someone was there," he said with a shrug. "I didn't even see him when he ran off. Did you?"

"I didn't see much," I admitted. "He was pretty good. Maybe he - " My breath caught as I had a horrible thought. "Maybe he's a spy for Loghain!"

Alistair frowned and rubbed at the stubble on his chin. He needed a shave, I noted absently. And a haircut, he was going to have girly bangs in a few days. "Even if he is, he can't report back for at least a week. Loghain's in the Bannorn, remember? We'll be long gone by then."

"At least we _hope_ he's in the Bannorn," I muttered. "Let's just go to bed already."

We trudged up the battered old stairs and down the damp hallway to our rooms, where there was some momentary confusion about whose was whose and we collided as we both tried to go through the same door. He blushed and I giggled, ready to be distracted from rain and spies and bad ale, and followed him when he tried to get out of my way, taking hold of his hands.

"I guess this is goodnight," I said, smiling up at him and tossing my hair back from my face.

"Uh, yeah, it is," he said, giving my hands a quick squeeze before letting go and opening the door to the other room. "Goodnight."

I stared after him in consternation until he shut the door in my face.

I was still angry about the whole evening when I tucked myself into bed, tossing and turning until I'd shoved the mattress lumps into a sort of nest. Rocky had given up on me in disgust, flopping on the braided rug when he grew tired of my thrashing, and I finally fell asleep listening to his quiet snores.

* * *

Halfway through a dream about walking around naked in the middle of the Commons, a familiar bellow shattered the harmless (albeit embarrassing) dream and replaced it with a blood-soaked battlefield.

Ostagar, again, but now I stood in the middle of it, desecrated corpses as far as I could see, rats and crows and darkspawn all feasting together on the rotting meat. I wondered why it didn't smell, and as soon as I wondered, the stench hit me like a punch in the gut and I doubled over, trying to throw up.

A hoarse shriek of laughter echoed across the grisly field, and I tried to look around but the scene swirled in front of me, so that even if I turned my head I was still looking down at the ground. Then I realized I was looking down at Duncan's body, his eyeless face crawling with vermin.

"Oh, so that's what you wanted me to see, eh?" I called to the Archdemon. "Well done, it's very realistic."

There was a moment of surprised silence, and then I found I could look away and straightened, searching the sky for the dragon. He stooped like a hawk and struck the ground with such force, a great flaming chasm opened in the ground beneath him, and the guttural grunts and slurps of feeding darkspawn and the screams and cries of their victims filled the air from the place of torment below.

I lost my balance before the ever-widening hole and fell in, but instead of the usual lurching terror of falling in dreams, I felt nothing, and instead of waking in sweat-soaked dread before hitting the ground, I landed painlessly and looked around.

The demon hadn't expected me to see anything down here and hadn't completed the scene. Patches of the flat, dead whiteness that was how I saw the Fade appeared around me, and with an effort, I focused on them until I stood on a limitless white plain. There, before me, sat the Archdemon.

"Not your best work," I said, and he roared with fury, bathing me in flame that flowed harmlessly over my body.

_Fear me! I am your doom!_

"Pff, you wish," I scoffed. "You have no hold on me."

And I woke up.

I looked around at the dark room, feeling extremely pleased with myself, and murmured a quick and rather sarcastic prayer of thanks to the helpful sloth demon who'd given me such practice messing around in the Fade.

* * *

"And then I said, 'You wish,' and I woke up." I concluded my tale of triumph the following morning over a breakfast of sticky porridge to a round of applause.

"All I got was an army of Glenlocks burning Redcliffe to the ground," Alistair complained, pouring milk on his bowlful of grayish sludge.

"Yes, well, we can't all be as awesome as me," I said, patting his hand. "And humble, too."

"Down-to-earth," he agreed, eyes twinkling.

"That's racist."

"You're right, I'm _above_ that kind of thing."

"Overgrown freak."

"Ankle-biter."

I used my spoon as an improvised catapult and splattered porridge across his breastplate.

"Children, behave," Wynne sighed, reaching out to wipe goop off his chin.

"Since this pitiful excuse for an inn cannot seem to produce anything worth eating this morning, I shall acquire my own breakfast," Morrigan said abruptly, coming to her feet and stalking off. Rocky jumped up from where he'd lain by my feet, bonking his head on the underside of the table in his haste, and loped after her.

"What's wrong with porridge?" Leliana asked, sprinkling brown sugar on hers. "It's nourishing. Of course, in Orlais, we always add berries and other fresh fruits."

"They probably have raisins in the kitchen," Alistair told her. She shuddered.

"Morrigan doesn't eat grains," I explained. "She says they're unnatural."

"_She's_ unnatural," Alistair said.

"Your _mom's_ unnatural."

"Latitia!" Wynne scolded. I squeaked and pretended to hide behind Alistair, cowering from her wrath.

"At any rate," Leliana said, returning to practical conversation, "Bodahn says the mules and the wagon are fit to ride today, so we can leave as soon as we're ready."

"Where is Bodahn, anyway?" I asked, plopping back in my seat and stirring more cream into my porridge. I had decided I liked cream. "Why doesn't he ever eat with us?"

"He stays with Sandal," Leliana explained. "Sandal doesn't like crowds and taverns."

"Poor kid," I said sadly. "He's quite a few buns short of a dozen, isn't he?"

"He's a nice boy, though," Wynne said fondly. She'd spent a great deal of time with him, riding in the wagon as her body got used to all the walking we were doing. She'd been in surprisingly good shape, but nothing in her life at the Tower had compared to this and I did worry about her.

"Should we wait until Morrigan and Rocky come back before we leave?" I fussed, keeping my butt firmly planted in my chair as the others started to stand up and put on their cloaks.

"They know where we're going," Alistair said, handing me my own cloak. "They'll catch up."

"I suppose there is only one road south to Dalish territory," I admitted, finally standing up and following the others outside.

I saw the sharp-eyed figure draped like a cat over a chair in the corner, but because I was leaving, and he didn't say or do anything, and in the light he looked very different from the flicker in the shadows I'd seen last night, I ignored him.

The rain cleared up during the night, and it was with great relief that I folded my heavy rain cloak and stuffed it back in Bodahn's wagon. Alistair brushed past me to do the same, already dressed in his armor, and I wrinkled my nose.

"By all the ancestors, Alistair, you smell absolutely awful," I told him, waving a hand in front of my nose for fresh air.

He hung his head. "It's the rain, the padding gets rusty and sweaty and then it reeks. Sorry."

"I mean, normally I like the smell of a man in armor, but this is really excessive," I continued, buckling my own studded leather in place.

"You're no bed of roses yourself, my friend," Morrigan said dryly from behind me, making me jump.

"Find a way to make the sun stop shining, and I'll stop sweating on my leather all day." I was kidding, but she narrowed her eyes speculatively at me.

"Give me some time to think," she said, pursing her lips before turning to her herb bag.

"You can't really stop the sun, can you?" I asked, astonished.

"Certainly not, fool dwarf," she snapped. "But perhaps I can prevent it burning you, and do us all a favor by keeping you and that odoriferous leather safely separated."

"You wouldn't really walk around without armor here, would you? I mean, this isn't the Imperial Highway, there are bandits," Alistair said, frowning.

"I don't need armor, I have you," I batted my eyes at him. Rocky barked. "And you, too, of course," I added, stroking his sleek head.

The mud dried slowly, and the puddles receded from the ravaged paving as the sun boiled them away. We passed out of farming country and into a range of foothills, the road gradually trending upwards as it switch-backed its way towards a low ridge. Trees provided welcome shade now that the farmers weren't constantly clearing the land.

We rounded a particularly sharp bend in the road and encountered a frantic woman, running towards us, her hair ragged and blood staining her skirt.

"Help! Come quickly! Bandits!" she cried, waving her hands.

"Wow, you were right," I muttered to Alistair as his hand went to his sword. "In the future, I will make an effort to avoid saying things that could turn out to be foreshadowing."

* * *

_Special thanks to mille libri for help untangling some issues, and also to serenbach, Arsinoe de Blassenville, Eva Galana, CynderJenn, Fluid Consciousness, jane-al and nithu for their lovely reviews, and to every reader just for coming along for the ride. I'm so glad to have you with me :)_

_New readers might be interested in the Cliff's Notes version of this story located at wellspringcd dot com. I know long stories get awkward and this should help._


	27. An Elf of a Different Color

_Effusive thanks for everyone who has read, favorited, alerted and especially reviewed! You guys rock my socks off!_

* * *

"Please come quickly," the woman begged when she came within earshot. "Bandits have overtaken the caravan! Please hurry!" And she turned and ran back the way she had come, beckoning to us insistently.

Alistair and Rocky took off at once, the former because a pretty girl needed protecting and the latter because something prey-like was running away from him. Although, come to think of it, the urges were pretty similar. I hesitated, worried about leaving Bodahn alone with bandits around, and made some quick decisions.

"Wynne, with me," I barked. There would be wounded to tend. "Morrigan, Leliana, stay with Bodahn."

I chased after the boys, outstripping Wynne and almost catching up to them as the road narrowed to follow an old riverbed. We rounded another turn, and I could hear Alistair breathing hard in his heavy armor.

The moment we rounded the second turn and the riverbed widened and shallowed, a deafening crash behind us brought me skidding to a halt and I looked back, terrified for Wynne. Someone had dynamited the ravine walls and brought forty cubic yards of earth and trees down across the path, cutting us off from Bodahn and the others, and Wynne was picking herself up off the road where the shock had knocked her off her feet. She'd skinned her knees but looked fine, and I pelted after Alistair again.

_Awesome. An ambush_, I thought, quickly scanning the scene. Two archers on the left bank, two more on the right. Narrow paths up each side. The woman we'd been chasing and the sharp-eyed man I'd seen in Glendale stood in the middle of the road, looking innocuous.

_Take out the archers first_, I decided. Alistair and Rocky had already made the same choice and leaped to the narrow, rocky path up the riverbank on the right. A flight of arrows shattered on Alistair's hastily-raised shield, one slicing shallowly across Rocky's flank. It only made him run faster... But something was dreadfully wrong. I jogged instead of running, worried, wondering what set off my alarm -

"Stop! Alistair! Rocky!" I bellowed. "_Stop!_"

Alistair hit the brakes, throwing up gravel; Rocky, gripped with hunting fever, ignored me and plowed through the tripwire. The fireball blew him off the path into the rough ravine wall, knocked Alistair head-over-heels to land badly with one leg caught beneath him, and threw shrapnel across the entire road. I ducked and blinked dust out of my eyes, searching around me for more traps.

A falling rock from the first fireball set off a second one, farther up, and suddenly those archers were as remote as the moon as the narrow path sheared away from the ravine wall and left them standing safely at the top, nocking arrows. Rocky lay stunned, barely visible under mud and gravel, and Alistair struggled to get up, shaking his head dazedly.

Two more tripwires on the other side. A third across the middle, between us and the woman, whose fingers now danced with electricity. The man beside her flicked his daggers into his hands and darted towards Alistair with liquid grace.

_We are going to die. _

I jerked my daggers free and scrambled across the debris to close with the assassin before he killed Alistair, who tried to stand, but one of his knees gave way and he fell hard, tangled up with his own sword.

I hurdled his prone form and fouled the assassin's strike, snaking my left arm through his right even as he struck and forcing him to spin and face me or be pulled to the ground by my momentum. He recovered much faster than he should have, and squared off with me; he looked me up and down, and a broad smile spread across his face. His strong white teeth looked even more brilliant against his golden-tanned skin.

He stabbed, I dodged. I kicked, he caught it and struck again. Beyond that, I couldn't think or plan, he was too fast for me to do anything but react.

An arrow grazed my thigh but I barely noticed, focusing on tapping a blow aimed at my head away without opening up to his second dagger and - yes, deflect the followup stab to the gut - Stone's mercy, the blade gleamed with poison - and the mage released her lightning.

Most of the energy flickered across my skin and into the waiting earth beneath my feet, but the shivery feeling stayed trapped in my muscles and for an instant I stood paralyzed and blind.

I waited to die, but instead I heard the wet sound of a heavy blade hitting flesh and a stifled yelp of pain, and when my vision cleared a second later, I saw my adversary hopping backwards on one foot, blood pouring from a deep gash across the other thigh that rendered the leg useless. He tripped and fell on his ass, scrambling backwards on his elbows towards his mage. Alistair balanced on one knee, propped up by his shield, his sword glazed with blood and an adrenaline-fueled grin on his face.

I staggered toward him, intending to help him up while the mage and assassin were occupied with wrapping the useless leg, when out of the corner of my eye I saw Wynne raise her fists above her head and a violent tremor shot out from her, throwing everyone off their feet as a crack appeared in the ravine wall, and the archers toppled from their lofty perches toward the boulders below.

The Stone _screamed_.

I curled in a tight ball, hands over my ears, and screamed with it. Terror flooded like ice through my veins with the racial memory of inescapable death as our beloved Stone tore itself apart above our heads.

"Stop it! Stop it!" I shrieked, rolling onto my face and pressing my forehead against the ground.

But the tremors continued, and I clung to the earth and shook with it. Rocky whimpered in fear and snuffled my neck, he must have woken up, four legs were a real advantage when the earth rippled like water -

"Get up," Alistair shouted at me, balancing himself with the tip of his sword like a walking stick. "Get _up -_"

And then he looked up, braced his shield and stepped over me. I felt his shadow pass over my body even though I had pressed my face back into the gravel, digging my fingers in until my nails tore. I heard him order Rocky to take down the mage, and Rocky's roar and the sick crunch when he bore the woman to the ground beneath him.

I turned my head to look, willing myself to listen to the voice in my skull that screamed _**get up you coward**_ but all I could do was watch as the assassin, his leg wrapped and steady again, circled Alistair with feline grace. He lunged, and Alistair slapped the blade aside with the edge of his shield, overbalancing slightly when he shifted weight to his sore knee. The assassin grinned and he sidestepped, aiming to force him to use his bad leg again, when a fresh ripple shot through the ground, and he stumbled. I wailed.

Alistair kept his feet by leaning on the point of his kite-shaped shield; after the tremor passed, but before he'd brought his shield up again, a bladed arrow split the air and buried itself in his right shoulder, sending bits of chainmail flying.

"Damn it," he muttered, as though he'd lost a game of dice and not just taken a broadhead in the shoulder, and staggered back a step, tripped over me and fell sprawling.

That did it. It was almost with relief that I found the balls to drag my broken nails out of the gravel and scoop up my daggers, balancing unsteadily on my feet between the two men. Alistair said something else, but I couldn't hear him over the new chorus of screams that filled my ears in advance of another tremor, my ancestors reliving their deaths yet again.

The assassin looked strangely satisfied, and waited until I steadied, spinning his daggers idly in his hands while, behind him, Rocky scrabbled his way up the tumbled hill towards the last remaining archer. I crouched, ready, and he attacked.

I'd never fought anyone like this. I'd never met anyone faster than I was. Fire blazed up my side – when had he cut me? We traded blow for blow, mine always just an instant too late, and minor injuries began to add up as the poison on his blades burned and pulsed through my veins.

I was losing.

Then white frost formed over his skin, and he shuddered, dropping one dagger from numb fingers – Morrigan had flown over the blockade. He'd been in mid-strike, and I seized his wrist, yanked him forward and off his balance, and, for once, managed to complete the maneuver, dragging him past me and throwing him face-first to the ground with a snap as I broke his arm over my knee. He rolled away from my backstab and I settled for slicing one hamstring.

Rocky arrived, covered in blood, much of it his own if the broken-off arrow in his hindquarters was any indication. He pounced -

"Don't kill, Rocky," I panted, falling to my knees. "Keep him still. I have questions."

Rocky restrained himself from crushing the blond skull with obvious difficulty, casting me a resentful look. I threw up, coughed, and tried to crawl over to Alistair, but Wynne was already there. She waved me away. I threw up again and swayed briefly before falling sideways to the mercifully still ground.

"Why did you do that," I spat at Wynne, struggling to get my hands and knees under me. "Why did – don't do that – don't."

A great raven fluttered to the ground by my head and blurred into Morrigan, who flipped me onto my back and pried my eyes open, glaring at me as if I'd done something rude by getting poisoned.

"Vile serpent, what poison is this?" She demanded of our prisoner.

"Adder's Kiss," he told her, his voice muffled against the ground.

She sat back with a satisfied look. "You did not do your homework, fool. The adder will not kill a dwarf."

"She may wish it did, it gives terrible dreams." He actually laughed a little, despite the eight-stone dog on his back.

The world spun around me and I lay flat, trying to forget the echoes of the dead, trying to ignore the ache I felt from the violent tear in the Stone. There were times when stone sense was not a blessing, I realized. Morrigan forced my mouth open and dripped something acrid and foul into it, holding my nose until I swallowed.

I don't know how much time passed while I shivered and burned as the poison flared and dissipated in my body, but when my vision cleared with surprising suddenness, I sat up and looked around.

Alistair sat cross-legged beside me, his armor lying in a glittering heap and his shoulder bandaged. Rocky lay panting in the sun, looking happy at a job well done, the wound in his hip scabbed over and white with smeared ointment. Wynne was looking at the tumbled earth that blocked the road, and Morrigan leaned on a fallen rock, examining her fingernails, one booted foot resting on the back of our would-be assassin's neck.

"I'm sorry," I told Alistair, red with shame.

He didn't say anything for a long moment. "Was it a dwarf thing?" he asked eventually.

I was surprised he had thought of that. "Yes. Earthquakes are a bad thing if you live underground."

"I suppose I can see that." He smiled briefly. "I suppose eventually _something_ was going to unnerve you in battle. It makes a man feel inadequate if his pint-sized companion is always braver than he is."

I scoffed. "Braver than you? Name _one_ time when you've done anything other than kick ass."

"Ah," came the assassin's muffled voice. "I hate to interrupt such a personal conversation, but may I point out that I'm quite possibly bleeding to death?"

I looked sharply to his leg and saw the spreading pool of blood that had collected around the calf I'd sliced. "Why hasn't anyone wrapped that up yet?"

"He tried to kill you," Morrigan pointed out calmly. "He came very close to succeeding."

I knelt with a grunt and crawled over to grab a loose bandage and tie it around the man's leg, ignoring his hiss of pain when I pulled it tight. "There. Now talk."

Morrigan moved her foot with an irritated huff and the man sat up, cradling his broken arm and grimacing. For the first time I actually thought about what I was seeing. He had long, blond hair with braids to keep it out of his face, tattoos, a golden tan and -

"What's up with your ears?" I asked him. Morrigan burst out laughing.

"Nothing that I know of," he said, in his exotic and musical accent, "Unless this is some precursor to a racist joke."

"The assassin is an elf," Morrigan told me, pleased at knowing more than me.

That explained the girly hair. And the lithe frame, and the fine-boned features, the angled eyes, and, yes, the very pointy ears. "Like the Dalish?" I asked, curious.

"His accent is Antivan, so no, I expect he is a city elf," Wynne said, coming back and reaching out to touch my forehead. I slapped her hand away and came to my feet.

"What the _hell_ did you do?" I demanded. I wobbled unsteadily and threw out a hand to steady myself, grabbing Alistair's head as the closest convenient object.

"Hey," he winced, moving my hand to his shoulder. I ignored him.

"It is a useful spell," Wynne said, her eyes flickering uncertainly despite her calm appearance. "Earth and stone are my most facile elements." She waved a hand and a rock flew across the road and smashed on the far side.

"You have no right!" I snarled now, getting angrier the more I thought about it. How far had those tremors gone? How many times had she used this spell? How many of the earthquakes my people had endured were caused by idiot mages like her?

"Excuse me?" She seemed genuinely baffled. "What do you mean, 'right'? Your people carve stone and even blast with dynamite. What is so wrong with what I do?"

"We _are_ the Stone! We don't destroy! We build! The tunnels we dig were already there, waiting! When we carve, we set the carving _free_!" I took a deep breath before I punched someone.

I wasn't sure how to explain that I heard voices in my head without sounding crazy. To be honest, I had never heard them before the Joining. My stone sense had been confined to a generalized feeling of 'space' and 'not space' that let me find my way through tunnels in the dark. Once I had bumped into a wall and been very confused until I realized I'd found a tunnel that had not yet been dug, and I cherished that secret.

I waved towards the deep rent in the ground. "That – that feels like an open wound. It's not natural. It's not meant to be there. And when you move the Stone, when you make an earthquake, the tremors go deep into the bedrock, you understand? You could be collapsing the Deep Roads and not even know."

She paled. "I did not know."

I curled a lip at her. _Obviously_ she didn't, the sun-touched savage. "You will not do that again."

She stiffened for an instant, and her eyes flashed, before she made herself relax and nod. "I will not do that again. I understand."

I felt deflated, now, as the fury drained from me as quickly as it had arrived. I didn't let myself get really angry very often, partly because I knew I would suffer more than anyone else if I did – I hated the feeling, and I hated the letdown afterward. I thumped back to the ground and leaned heavily against Alistair, who braced one hand on the ground behind me so I could get comfortable.

"So, elf," I returned to the subject at hand, who had observed the exchange with amusement. "Who are you, and why did you try to kill us?"

"My name is Zevran Arainai, and yes, I am from Antiva," he began, shifting his grip on his injured arm. "I am of the Antivan Crows."

Alistair caught his breath and stiffened angrily, but I didn't know why, so I said, "I assume you don't mean you're a bird."

He smiled mirthlessly. "The Crows are an order of assassins."

"That explains a lot. Who hired you?"

"Loghain," he replied promptly. "And before you ask why I am so free with this information, let me assure you, I have no desire to protect my former employer. I have failed in my assignment, and as such, my life is forfeit. I cannot return to the Crows. So you see, there is no reason for me to lie to you now."

I nodded, thinking of Bherat. "Succeed or die, eh? Sounds familiar. Do you know if Loghain's got anyone else out for us?"

He shook his head. "I do not know for certain. I do know, however, that I was the only Crow willing to attempt this assignment. It seems the others thought the Gray Wardens would be too difficult to kill." He smiled suddenly, flashing his brilliant teeth. "It would seem they were correct."

Alistair grinned smugly, but I sighed and let my head fall back on his shoulder. His grin faded and he handed me his water flask with his free hand, which I took and drained. Zevran watched.

"So, if I may ask," he said, when I finally dropped the flask and wiped my mouth, "What will you do with me now?"

"I dunno." I shrugged a shoulder, beyond anger.

"Kill him," Morrigan said at once. "He is an assassin. He cannot be trusted."

"I can assure you, I have no motivation to kill you now," Zevran said quickly. "My life is indeed yours to do with as you see fit."

He dragged himself to his knees, still unable to stand due to the slashed hamstring, and bowed floridly to me. "I pledge my life wholly to your service, in whatever capacity you require. I will fight for you and die for you. I could also stand around and look pretty, if you prefer. Warm your bed? Fend off unwanted suitors? No?"

"She doesn't need anything from you," Alistair said roughly.

"Oh? You can manage _all_ of that yourself?" Zevran raised an elegant eyebrow. Alistair flushed and drew in his breath for a hot reply.

"I have Rocky to keep me warm, don't I, my good doggy," I interrupted in a singsong tone, reaching to pull the dog's head into my lap to defuse the boys with fuzzy cuteness. Rocky flopped obligingly and stuck his legs in the air, pawing at my face as I rubbed his soft cheeks. "As for you, elf, if you expect me to let _you_ into my tent, then you must think I'm royally stupid."

He grinned at me again, the smooth smile of a man who expects his charm to work. "I think you're royally tough to kill. And utterly gorgeous. Not that you'll respond to simple flattery. But there are worse things in life than serving the whims of a deadly sex goddess."

"Fine, then," I shrugged again. "Now sit down and shut up before you break something else."

"What?" Alistair sat up quickly, and I grumbled when I slid off his shoulder and had to sit up, too. "You want to bring the _assassin_ with us? The _apostate_ wasn't enough?"

"He might be useful," I told him quietly and hoped he wouldn't argue with me in front of him.

"But – Latitia, he – " Alistair stammered, glancing uncertainly between us. "You can't trust _him_!"

I looked at the defeated elf, who smiled tightly, despite the unhealthy grayish tinge to his skin that spoke eloquently of pain and lost blood. I believed him. I didn't know the Crows, but I knew what happened to people who failed Bherat: They disappeared. Zevran had no reason to try to betray us now; going back to the Crows would be suicide, if they were anything like the Carta.

I could just send him on his way, but he'd almost beaten me at my own game. It had been a long time since I'd met someone who fought like I did, but better. Curiosity stirred in my breast as I wondered what deadly techniques the Crows might know.

But I didn't want to explain all this in front of him. He definitely hadn't earned that much trust. So instead, I fixed Alistair a steady gaze and told him, "Do you want to murder him? Go ahead."

He scowled and looked away. "Of course not. You know I don't want to – to _murder_ anyone."

I hated bullying him. I reached for his hand, but Leliana's head poked over the top of the barricade. "I think I found a way for Bodahn's wagon to go around," she called. "Oh! Latitia! You're up!"

She began carefully picking her way down the rocks, peppering me with questions about my health and our new traveling companion, and I answered as best I could between mouthfuls of the jerky I now always carried in my pockets.

"Wynne," I said finally, "Heal Zevran's leg, will you? I don't know if that ointment will work on a snapped hamstring. But don't fix his arm, just set it and splint it."

She frowned at me. "You want me to deny him healing?"

"It's his main hand," I told her grimly. "Let's wait a few days before we make him fighting-fit again."

She obviously didn't like the idea, and really, neither did I. But as it stood, if he could manage to kill us tonight, he might be able to return to Loghain and say he succeeded. No one would know. If we waited a week, though, and were seen in towns with him, word of his failure would get back to Loghain and then we could finally be sure he wouldn't betray us to the Crows. I caught his eye and he gave me a small nod before holding his arm out for Wynne to set; he understood.

For some reason that made me feel better.


	28. Goods and Services

I wasn't up for much travel, and Alistair and our new favorite murderer weren't in much better shape. So as soon as we'd brought Bodahn's wagon around on the side track Leliana had scouted out for him, we started looking for a good place to make camp.

"Alistair," Wynne said to him as he walked past her with a rock for the firepit, "You're limping. What happened?"

"He sprained his knee in the fight," I told her, angry that she had noticed his pain before I did. That was _my_ job, damn it. And why hadn't she healed it before? _That_ was _her_ job.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, dear," she said, so evidently she agreed with me. "I must have healed it partway as a side effect of healing your shoulder, but I failed to realize you had other injuries."

"It's fine, really," he said, dumping the rock and turning to get another one, but he winced when he picked it up. The knee must be stiffening up now.

"I'll finish the pit, Alistair," Leliana offered. "You can relax."

I dropped my last load of firewood and sat down beside him, worming my way under his arm so he could lean on me if he wanted. Also, it was an excellent excuse for cuddles. I was learning that, as long as he could pretend he had some practical reason for letting me touch him, he wouldn't blush and shy away.

The evening passed pleasantly enough, with the usual idle campfire conversation and assignment of watches. We ate a savory ham and pea soup and Rocky got the ham bone, so everyone was happy. Zevran, we decided, would sleep on the ground within sight of the fire, so whoever was on watch could easily keep an eye on him.

The elf kept his mouth shut and his eyes open.

The following day, around noon, we crested a small hill and saw our destination: Orayan's Cross, a trading post that had sprung up at an intersection between the South Road and the Brecilian Passage. The town was shaped in a semicircle around a broad plaza, which was full of tents and canvas-covered booths striped in bright primary colors.

"Hey, a fair!" Alistair pointed happily to the colorful display.

"Is that special?"

"It means good shopping," Leliana told me as Bodhan drove his mules towards a line of hitching posts. He left Sandal with the wagon and bustled off to do some business, and I started to follow him, but remembered our newest crew member.

I turned to frown at Zevran. "What are we going to do with _you_?"

He smiled. "While I am a bit hampered by this arm, which was so recently broken by a vision of loveliness, I am still available for any number of uses. Indeed, with a bit of creativity, one can turn adversity into a surprisingly titillating solution. I remember a certain Orliesan beauty with one leg -"

"Are you trying to be funny?" Alistair asked gruffly.

"He's succeeding," I said with a snort of laughter. "Fine. Leliana, make Zevran stay with you and don't let him assassinate anyone. Rocky, stay with Leliana." He whined. "Stay with Leliana!" I repeated firmly, and marched off, dragging Alistair by the hand.

"Where are we going?" he asked, stumbling as I pulled him off-balance with my shorter stride.

"Shopping," I said. "You're going to show me around."

Merchants hawked their wares, some going so far as to wave them in our faces – a man selling fabric thrust a bolt of silk at Alistair, telling him he should be dressing me better, and a woman with a plate of sweet rolls popped up in front of me and shoved the plate under my nose. It worked; soon she was a few coppers richer, and I had very sticky fingers.

Speaking of sticky fingers, at a gentle tug on my belt pack, I spun and snagged the wrist of a skinny, filthy little boy in mid-pocket-picking.

"Wrong target, my friend," I said pleasantly. He reacted by whipping a knife out of his pocket and slashing at my hand; I let go quickly, and his tactic might have worked, except Alistair scooped him up, pinning his arms to his body. The boy thrashed and kicked futilely at his armor.

"Now what?" Alistair asked, grimacing as the boy tried to bite.

"One second." I fished around in my pack for the jerky I always carried now, and thrust it into the boy's free hand, wrapping his fingers around it. "Take it and go," I said to his wide-eyed, bewildered face.

"I should let him go?" Alistair asked. I nodded, and he dropped the kid, who vanished without a second glance.

"I get the charity thing, but why not give him money?" Alistair craned his neck, trying to see where he'd gone.

"If I give him money, his boss would just take it away, or someone bigger would steal it from him. Food, though, he can eat that right now." I scowled for an instant, remembering my mother taking every cent I 'earned' and spending it on cheap wine, but the thought was quickly replaced by the sight of a farmstand selling fruit.

"Oooh!" I dashed to the booth and started pawing through the baskets, looking for strawberries.

Alistair watched for a few minutes before apparently figuring out what I was doing. "There aren't any more strawberries," he said apologetically.

"How do _you_ know?"

"Because it's too hot, and too late in the year. There won't be any more until next year."

I stared at him, horrified. "_Next year_?"

"There's probably blueberries," he said hurriedly. "And soon there will be raspberries."

Weren't raspberries a noise? Apparently they were also a berry. I scowled at him. "Why is your food so fickle?"

So he explained about seasons. Weather, it seemed, was an unfaithful bitch, and I finally understood what Morrigan had meant when she'd said a long quest might mean I'd see snow. Worse than that, apparently it got so cold that water could freeze! _People_ could freeze!

"All right, so the weather is trying to kill us, what else is new," I said, looking back at the fruit. I paid the farmer for a basket of blueberries and wandered off again, cradling the basket tightly to my chest and occasionally dropping a few berries at a time into Alistair's hand rather than give him direct access. Sharing food was still difficult, I realized, even though my new life had plenty of it. I knew we could just buy more, but still... _My_ berries!

At least I wasn't hiding scrambled eggs in my pockets anymore. That had turned out to be a really bad idea.

Alistair poked at my fingers laced protectively over the berry basket. "Can I have more?"

"What will you give me?" I countered.

"Uh..." He patted his pockets and came up with nothing. "Gratitude?"

"I might trade berries for kisses," I told him with a sly grin.

He looked panicky. "Now? But there's all these people -"

"Then I guess you don't really want these berries," I sniffed, popping a fistful of them into my mouth and chewing noisily. "Mmmmmmm... They're soooo good."

"Wait!" He put his hands on my shoulders and kissed the top of my head. "There, what does that get me?"

I gave him a disgusted look, carefully picked out the smallest berry and held it out to him.

"Aw," he whined, looking at the minuscule berry, but now I was distracted again.

"Look, shoes." I trotted over to the red-and-purple striped booth and its racks of clothing and footwear. What had caught my eye were a pair of sandals, made of leather dyed blue and tied with a pretty blue satin ribbon. I put down my basket and picked up one of the sandals, turning it over. It had a good, thick leather sole, too. A girl could actually walk in these.

"How much?" I asked the attentive merchant.

He eyed me carefully, trying to judge how much I'd be willing to pay, and caught sight of my brand. I could tell the instant he did so, because he turned several shades paler under his tan. He snatched the shoe out of my hands and looked pleadingly over my head at Alistair. "Ser, please, don't let your servant touch my wares."

"Serfan'?" Alistair mumbled in surprise, his mouth full of stolen berries. He swallowed hard and surrendered the basket to me before leaning forward and placing his hands on the table. "You have no idea how _not_ my servant she is. Now, please give the lady a price before anyone does anything they will regret."

The flustered merchant stammered for a moment before naming a price that sounded pretty good to me, but Alistair scowled at him until he shaved off another couple coins before he paid the poor man, who wrapped them in a piece of plain cloth so they wouldn't get dusty.

"I guess he's been to Orzammar," I said as I examined the crevices of the basketweave, looking for lost berries.

"He was incredibly rude!" Alistair sounded outraged and I looked up at him, startled.

"He just knows what this means, that's all." I tilted my head to show him the geometric symbol around my right eye, and the two smooth black lines that traced the curve of my cheekbone and jaw.

"It's not just decoration?" He cupped my cheek in one hand and brushed his thumb over the markings.

"No, it's a brand. It means I'm the lowest of the low, casteless, remember? No place in society, no job options except theft or prostitution or marauding the Deep Roads. I told you this already, why are you making me tell you again!" I'd started out casual, but having to remind him _again_ had stirred up enough shame and resentment that I jerked my head out of his hand and started walking again.

"I'm sorry," he said as he jogged after me. "It's just so hard to think of you as anything less than – well, what you are."

I missed a step as I tried to puzzle this statement out. What I was, was casteless. There _wasn't_ anything less than what I was. Then I saw Morrigan. "Hey, Morrigan!" I called.

She glanced at me from where she bent over a small booth covered in sparklies. A number of nearby merchantmen were missing sales opportunities as they stared in slack-jawed astonishment at our sexy, exotic, almost-naked witch, and customers were bumping into each other and dropping things and generally making fools of themselves. Nobody, however, was brave enough to try to flirt with her.

I bent to see what she was looking at. Mostly costume jewelry, brass and colored glass, and Morrigan didn't seem to know the difference as she extended a longing hand towards a particularly cheap-looking necklace of base-metal wire filigree.

"The lady has good taste," the oily merchant behind the counter simpered, and I glared at him. Liar. Morrigan picked up a different piece, then, a bracelet set with red glass 'stones,' and the merchant added, "Genuine garnet and ruby from the Orliesan court itself."

Alistair went 'oooh' and bent to look, too. Honestly, I was surrounded by rubes. The merchant finally noticed the little woman glaring daggers at him and flinched. I stalked around to his side of the table and asked him in a cold whisper, "Do you have anything _real_?"

"Please don't tell the guards," he whimpered.

"I don't know, I usually feel honor-bound to report this kind of thing." I rubbed my chin thoughtfully and then pretended to have an idea. "But you know, I heard that gold has a real bad effect on a person's memory. If I suddenly found myself in possession of some genuine gold, I would probably forget all about telling the guards."

"You don't say," the merchant said glumly. He sighed and rummaged around in a small lockbox before producing a gold chain with a gleaming tiger-eye pendant.

"Oh yes, that will do nicely." I palmed the necklace and left, dragging Morrigan and Alistair after me as they cast longing looks over their shoulders at all the shiny things.

"Latitia, Alistair, I'm so sorry, I can't find Zevran!" Leliana's frantic cry came from somewhere off to my right, and she barreled into me before I could react, wringing my hands. "Are you all right? I'm _so_ sorry! I had to go to the toilet and I told Rocky to watch him but they're both gone now."

My stomach froze as visions of a murdered Rocky filled my head, but before I could say anything, a smooth voice cut in from behind me. "Fear not, my dears, we are here."

I turned in time to see a shadow detach itself from the crowd and form into our missing elf. Rocky still followed a step behind him, staring at him, and I burst out laughing.

"You silly dog," I said between relieved chuckles, rubbing his shoulders as he wiggled in pleasure, "Have you been faithfully watching him just as hard as you can? Oh yes you have, I can tell! What a good watch dog! Nothing gets past you, no ser!" He barked.

Around us, the merchants were beginning to pack up their wares as the sunlight turned ruddy gold, and we made our way back to Bodahn's wagon. Wynne was still there, relaxing with Sandal as he curried the mules and responding affectionately to his occasional happy comment about the animals. Bodahn arrived from the other direction, lugging a heavy box.

"Is there an inn here?" I asked him as Alistair helped him boost the box into the wagon. "What'd you buy?"

"Salt," he grunted. "One of the few things Dalish will trade for. They're awfully proud, you know." The box fell into place and he straightened up, dusting off his hands. "Yes, there's an inn, the Bear's Den. I've already made reservations."

"Thanks, Bodahn," I said, impulsively embracing the surprised dwarf. "You've been our mortar."

The well-kept inn's tavern gleamed with fine woods from the Forest, coated in many layers of varnish until they shone like glass. I cast admiring glances at the paneling on the walls and the parquet floor; these woods were worth their weight in silver back home.

Clumped around the largest table in the corner, a group of military men caroused in a civilized sort of way, singing bar songs with a minimum of sexual or scatological details. Watching them, I had a sudden idea, and cornered the overworked bar wench as she tried to bring them a heavy tray of ale.

"I'll take them this round," I told her, taking the tray before she could work up the energy to complain.

"So, boys," I said cheerily as I set the mugs down. "Where are you off in the morning?"

"Denerim, eventually," said the closest man, a bulky fellow with a luxurious red beard. "We're to join with Loghain's army. He's called on our bann."

"We din' wanna go," added another, farther gone in his cups. "But our bann had t' send someone or he'd get in trouble. He don' wanna mess wit' Loghain."

"Neither do I," I lied easily. "Myself, I need to send a message to the Teyrn and I just don't know who I can trust to carry it. There's so much trouble on the road, I need someone really strong. Someone who's not gonna end up as darkspawn food. Do you know anyone like that?"

"Come on, girlie, look who you're talkin' to," laughed the bearded one. "We'll carry your message."

"What'll it cost me?" I asked, raising a coy eyebrow.

The man grinned, making his beard wag. "If you'll sit here on my lap and sign a song with us, we'll do it for free."

"Um..." Fighting a sudden rush of dread, I glanced at my friends and saw Alistair was watching. That made me feel a little braver and I nodded, forcing a smile. "Sure. What are we singing?"

My patron quickly told me the words and I perched carefully on one of his knees, ready to bolt if he tried anything funny. He rested one huge hand on the small of my back, but I could handle that, so we sang.

"All right, I better go and get that message," I told my patron when the song ended after its inevitable dirty pun. He ruffled my hair affectionately and I trotted off, intending to borrow paper from Bodahn.

But Alistair jumped up from his chair as I passed him and grabbed my hand. "What are you doing?" he demanded in a hoarse whisper.

"Those guys are going to join Loghain's army," I explained. "I got them to agree to take a message to him, and I'm going to tell him that we beat Zevran. That way, Zevran's screwed – he can't ever go back to the Crows because they'll know he's failed."

"But why did you -" He stopped himself with obvious effort, and released my hand. "Right, okay."

Thinking he might have been worried about the Red-Beard hurting me, I assured him, "I wouldn't have done it if you weren't here watching."

I'd been wrong – he looked baffled and a little offended. "What? Why?"

"Because you wouldn't have let them hurt me," I said uncertainly. I didn't know what I'd done wrong, or how to fix it.

Alistair blinked in surprise, then cast a fierce look at the other men in the bar before standing protectively over me. "You're right, I wouldn't," he said, grinning proudly and escorting me on my trip to the wagon.

Bodahn kept extensive notes and ledgers, and I tore out a blank page and borrowed one of his graphite sticks, thankful that he wasn't yet so sun-touched as to write with a quill, because I had no idea how to use them. I brought the supplies back into the tavern and laid the paper on our group's table to compose our correspondence.

_Dear Loghain_, I wrote. _How kind of you to send us a Crow. We're sure we can get a good price selling his gear. Looking forward to seeing you. Hopefully our Mabari won't choke on that blackened, shriveled husk you use as a heart. Regards, the Gray Wardens._

"Nice," Alistair approved, reading over my shoulder. I flashed him a quick grin, folded up the paper and tied it with string. I returned to the jolly soldiers in the corner with my missive; they'd progressed past the 'raucous singing' stage and into the 'I love you guys' phase of drunkenness.

"Here's the message," I told Red-Beard. "Remember, it's very important and it has to go directly to Loghain. It has to do with stopping the Blight."

When he heard the B-word, the man's face turned grave, and he tucked the letter into his breast pocket. "I will deliver it to him myself."

The inn served a venison roast that I found rather tough and gamy, but the others said it was good so I guess I just don't like venison. When bedtime rolled around, we realized we had no idea what to do with our Crow.

"We could take turns guarding him," Alistair suggested.

I rolled my eyes. "We're staying at an inn and you want us to leave our warm beds and stand watch?"

"We cannot simply lock him in and leave him," Wynne joined the discussion. "I sincerely doubt there's any knot or lock we could use that he couldn't escape, given a whole night to do it in. If we're going to keep him a prisoner, we had better be thorough. Otherwise, I'm going to heal his arm now and have done with it."

"That really bothers you, doesn't it?" I said to her. "I had planned to ask you to heal it tomorrow night, after our messenger boys are well out of town."

Zevran's face, which had worn a mask of disinterest, lit briefly. "That is sooner than you had promised. Thank you."

"Yeah, well, we were going to have to give you your freedom eventually," I shrugged.

"Warden, I have never had my freedom, and tomorrow night will be no different. I have sworn to serve you, and we will merely trade chains of steel for chains of the heart," he told me, his eyes suddenly as piercing as the Crow dagger I had hidden in my pack. Then he laughed, and his face returned to its usual easy charm. "Metaphorically speaking, of course."

We gave him a room and dragged a chair in from the tavern so his guard could sit out of arm's reach, and I left Alistair leaning back in his chair, showing off shamelessly by balancing it on two legs with his sword in his lap, with a warning that if he fell over and cut off his hand, I would laugh at him.

Leliana woke me for my watch in the wee hours of the morning and, grumbling, I dragged some pants on and trudged into the elf's room. He watched me with his feline eyes while I made myself comfortable in the too-large chair with my daggers in my lap.

"Sorry about all this," I said after a while.

"Oh?"

"I mean, I know you could escape if you wanted to. You've had any number of opportunities. This whole guarding thing is a farce."

"Then why do you persist?"

"So the others feel better."

"Are you not the leader?"

"Only be accident. I'd rather not bully them more than I have to. Alistair really ought to be in charge."

He laughed, teeth flashing in the dim light. "Somehow I do not think your fellow Warden is leadership material."

"Sod off. You don't get to talk about him." I wasn't really angry, but I wanted to set limits, right now, on this behavior before we had another Morrigan on our hands.

"Understood," he said, shifting around so he was staring at the ceiling again. His broken arm was bound close to his chest, and I could see the bruising around the joint even in the dark room. He fidgeted with the sling with his good hand, wincing as he tried to move it into a more comfortable position.

"Sorry about that, too," I admitted.

"It was a very good move," he replied, looking over at me again with amusement. "I must admit, I never studied full-contact combat. I much prefer a more... intimate sort of grappling."

"You must be a big hit with the ladies."

"I try." After a long, searching pause, he added, "Today's fair was a golden opportunity. I feel as though I know you quite well."

"Huh? Oh. You were following me?" Sneaky bugger.

"Oh yes. The swindler, the prejudiced shoe merchant... The street urchin. Most educational."

I squirmed inwardly, thinking back on the day's events and wishing I had been less affectionate and more of a bad-ass. His bosses had obviously ruled through fear and I worried I would not be able to control him if he thought me weak.

Oh, Stone have mercy, he must have heard I was casteless, too. Oh no...

"So what did you mean when you said you'd never had your freedom?" I asked, taking the offensive.

His face went still and he clearly considered refusing to answer. But eventually he told me, with a very convincing air of casualness that I knew was false because I use it myself, "I was born in an Antivan whorehouse. It is not a life of unbridled joy. And then I was sold to the Crows and, of course, the Crows do not let their property wander about without permission."

"You're the son of a whore?" I repeated, and his eyes darkened before I added, "Me too!"

"You're quite pretty for a son," he said, covering an instant of startled hesitation. "Not that I have any problem with that. Sons, daughters... Both are delicious in their own way."

I rolled my eyes. "Anyway. Not that Orzammar has many actual whorehouses. Most of them are 'independent businesswomen.'"

"And I have only the greatest respect for their achievements. Indeed, some of the richest and most powerful women in Antiva are whores. Men, too, actually." He fidgeted again with his sling and sighed.

I looked at him a bit more closely. He looked distinctly scruffy, nowhere near as smooth and shiny as he'd been when I first met him. "Your hair needs re-braiding."

"It is a bit of a challenge with one hand," he said shortly.

"Ask Leliana to do it in the morning. She loves hair."

"Ah yes, our delicate Orliesan flower. She strikes me as a sweet thing. A shame she has taken Chantry vows."

"Has she?" I asked, surprised. "Like what kind of vows?"

"Oh, poverty, humility... chastity." He heaved a theatrical sigh. "A pity. I have long wondered whether the strict uniform requirements of the Chantry dictate special undergarments."

"Nope, she wears regular panties and a breastband," I said without thinking. Then I clapped a hand over my mouth. "Oh man, I probably wasn't supposed to tell you that. Please don't tell her. I keep forgetting what prudes humans are."

He rolled over and propped himself up on his good elbow, eying me with interest and a sly smile. "And how," he purred, "would you know what Leliana wears under her impenetrable robes?"

I burst out laughing at the insinuation, and at that moment, the door swung open and Alistair stuck his head in.

"I heard you laughing. What'd I miss?" he asked, looking hard at Zevran.

"We're having fun at Leliana's expense," I giggled. "Why are you up?"

"I got hungry." He crossed to where I sat, and reached out to run a caressing hand through my hair. I smiled and leaned my cheek against his hand.

"What brought this on?" I asked, nuzzling his palm and wondering why he wasn't stuffing his hands in his pockets and looking sheepish by now.

"Do I need a reason?"

"No." I bit his thumb and he laughed, finally pulling away.

"Anyway," he said, ruffling his own hair and looking a little flushed, "Do you want anything from the kitchen?"

"Yeah, okay. See if they made breakfast yet. It's almost morning and I could do with some real food."

"Let us all go down," Zevran cut in, sitting up and pushing off his blanket. "I doubt I will sleep any more this morning."

The innkeeper was just putting the day's bread in the ovens, and boiling water for porridge. We made puppy eyes at him until he threw some scrambled eggs together for us, topping them with a sprinkling of shredded cheese and fresh herbs.

"This is the best inn we've stayed at," I said to Alistair as he shoveled eggs into his mouth.

"Yef," he agreed, narrowly avoiding spraying egg across the table. He swallowed and added, "But don't tell Lloyd."

"Oh goodness no. It would break his heart."

After the others had all filtered downstairs and had their own breakfast, we went to Bodahn's spice merchant to ask whether he knew where the Dalish were. The man, Malcam, owned a chain of spice shops from Orlais to Denerim, and considering the Dalish needed to trade for salt regularly to provide salt licks to the halla, we figured he'd know whether any had been to town lately.

The shop smelled amazing, and Morrigan immediately began perusing the large glass jars of herbs, occasionally making small exclamations of excitement under her breath. I hoped she wouldn't want me to spend all our money here. Malcam himself was painstakingly bottling minute amounts of brightly colored powders, probably dyes. I stood near his table and waited patiently until he was finished writing down what he'd done

"Yes, thank you for waiting," he said to me when he finally closed the ledger and looked up. "What can I do for you?"

"We're looking for the Dalish," I told him. "Have any come by?"

"Actually, yes, two days ago," he replied, opening his ledger again and flipping a couple of pages. "Here we go. I was wrong, it was three days ago. Why, do you want to trade with them?"

"We're Gray Wardens, and we want to recruit their help against the Blight," I told him, after a moment's hesitation. There was a chance, of course, that he followed Loghain and would report us, but I thought it far more likely that he cared only for his caravans and would support anyone who promised to end the darkspawn predations.

I was right, his eyes widened. "Thank Andraste someone is doing something! I've lost four wagons this week. I'm going to go bankrupt! I've had to cancel all caravans along the South Road, it's too close to the Wilds."

He paused, and tapped his chin for a few seconds. "I know people say you can't find the Dalish in the forest, but their trail should still be warm. I see you've a Mabari; perhaps he could track them? If you leave right away you might stand a chance of catching them."

"All right, we'll do that," I said, nodding. "Thank you." I herded my friends out of the shop before they could spend all our money in one go.

* * *

_Long ago in a land far away (actually about 8 miles) a very small, wet, angry WellspringCD was thrust screaming into the world. Today has been Rock Band, Dragon Age, the dog park, and Burger King, arguably an improvement. Ooh! Reviews make AWESOME birthday presents :D_

_...Just kidding. You guys are t3h r0x0rs and you make my day! Thank you for reading!_


	29. Waltz vs Flamenco

_A bit of a break before we venture into the deadly Forest. Enjoy, and thank you so much for reading, favoriting, alerting and especially reviewing!_

* * *

We took Rocky to the corral used by the halla when the Dalish came to town, and he memorized the scent, then trotted purposefully towards the logging road leading into the forest, our caravan in pursuit. The rutted road had been cleared on both sides to help prevent ambush from beast or bandit (same thing, really) and some of the sawn-off tree stumps were as wide as I am tall. I know because I lay down on one to check.

"Yep, sure enough," I noted. The top of my head and tips of my toes just barely reached the edges.

"That's one big tree," Alistair said in some awe. "Maker's breath, how _old_ must it have been?"

"Old, I guess." I spread my arms out and laid my head down to enjoy the sun-warmed wood against my skin.

"We can count the rings and find out. There's one ring per year," he suggested.

That went on for about ten minutes until we decided that the tree was "very old" and that was good enough, and ran to catch up with Bodahn and Rocky. My dog crisscrossed the road, checking both sides for the scent of the halla leaving the marked road and entering the forest, but so far they had kept on straight and we made good time.

Despite the age of the trees, Leliana insisted that we had not yet penetrated the forest proper. "The earth remembers the dead in the true Forest," she told me, her eyes aglow with storytelling fervor. "So many battles fought, so much blood to feed the trees."

I shuddered, and hoped we wouldn't ever have to walk in that dread jungle.

All creepy bardic forebodings aside, we made a cheery enough camp, settled in among the stumps and underbrush with plenty of scrap wood for an excellent fire, and cozy nooks among tree roots for our tents. A coolness had blown out from the trees when the sun went down, and we clustered around our roaring fire to enjoy the venison haunch we'd bought from the inn. Wynne restored Zevran's arm, and his first act was to brush and re-braid his fine blond hair.

"Oh, I got presents," I said suddenly, remembering the shoes and necklace. Then I wished I hadn't said anything, because I hadn't bought presents for everyone, only Leliana and Morrigan. Oh well, too late.

First I dug out the sparkling gold chain and held it out to Morrigan, before she could disappear to make her den on the edge of camp. "Remember that booth with the jewelry? He lied when he said he had rubies, and I got him to give me this in exchange for not telling the guards. It's real gold and real tiger-eye. I think it would look good with your eyes."

She took it and tilted the stone this way and that, watching the firelight play on the stone's refracted surface. Eventually, she said, "Again you give me a gift, and again I find I do not know what is expected of me."

"You just say thank you. And if you like it, you should say so, because then the person who gave it to you might give you other gifts like it in the future," I explained. Leliana looked scandalized at this academic description of the gift-giving process, but how else would Morrigan learn?

"Ah. That is... simple enough. 'Tis a fine gift. You have my thanks."

"You're very welcome. You did just save my ass when I was having my little Crow problem, remember?" I smirked at Zevran, who looked predictably offended at the description – though his eyes glinted with amusement.

"Truly. I approve of the method by which you obtained it," she added. "The fool should not have tried to deceive his betters."

"Indeed." I watched her fasten the chain around her neck and smiled for a moment before going and digging the shoes out of my pack.

"For you," I said to Leliana, handing her the wrapped bundle. She took it with a raised eyebrow, and unwrapped it gently. For a long moment she sat very still with the shoes on her lap, and for a horrible instant I thought she was going to cry.

"They're... _beautiful_," she wailed, clutching them to her chest with one arm and leaping up to hug me with the other. "Oh, I can't believe it, I never thought I'd have dancing shoes again."

"Is that what they are? We'd better dance, then!" I grinned at her and stood up. "Put them on and let's go."

She did, and took my hand, wrapping her other arm around my waist and swirling me around the campfire in the waltz she'd taught me back in Redcliffe.

"This was really thoughtful of you. I know shoes are not your cup of tea, yet you thought of me and knew I would like them," she said softly, holding me close and resting her cheek on the top of my head. I assumed this was part of the dance, so I cooperated and adjusted my steps to keep my body in synch with hers, although I did turn my head to keep my face out of her bosom.

After a few turns around the camp, though, I got bored of 'one-two-three, one-two-three' and pulled away a little. "Teach me something harder," I challenged, grinning.

To my surprise, Zevran jumped up and bowed, extending the hand of his newly-healed arm to me. "Allow me to give you a sample of Antiva," he purred. "I believe _flamenco_ would do nicely."

"Okay, that sounds fun!" I started to transfer from Leliana's arms to Zevran's, but noticed Alistair's kicked-puppy expression and quickly changed my plans. "Actually, I have a better idea – I'll keep the beat and you dance with Leliana. She's a fantastic dancer and I bet you guys could really cut a rug."

"What do you think, my Orliesan flower?" Zevran asked her, wearing his most dazzling smile. "Will you honor me with a dance on this fine summer's evening?"

She blushed and giggled becomingly. "Only if you promise not to murder me."

"My lovely, when they call me a lady-killer, they mean something entirely different." He stepped up to her and slipped an arm around her waist, pulling her snugly against him. She squeaked and blushed brighter as he smirked at her, his free hand finding hers in a languid caress. Unnoticed, I took a pair of sticks out of the kindling pile and sat next to Alistair.

"Shall we begin?" Zevran murmured into her ear, and she smiled and nodded almost in spite of herself.

"He's smooth," Alistair muttered to me in grudging admiration.

"Like a buttered nug." I dragged the cooking pot over as Zevran gave her a brief rundown of the basic flamenco steps. It turned out Leliana knew the dance and she let go of him to clap out a rhythm for me.

I picked it up, using the cooking pot, but quickly got carried away and incorporated my bowl, the log we sat on, Alistair's discarded helmet, and his shield. There was no echo, but I could do without one.

Zevran led Leliana in a quick, sensual dance and I was eventually glad I hadn't tried to dance with him, because I definitely didn't know him well enough to be comfortable with his hips doing _that_ against my thigh. When he concluded their dance by tipping her backwards against his arm for an instant before scooping her up and twirling her in a full circle, I joined in with an enthusiastic drum fill that I finished by banging both sticks on Alistair's breastplate with a loud, flat _bonk_.

"Hey," he protested mildly.

"Good acoustics on that armor," I said, wearing my usual broad, slightly manic drumming grin, and a breathless and giddy Leliana ran to the water barrel to refill her mug. Zevran watched her with a smug smile playing about his lips, before sinking down to drape himself at the foot of a stump next to me, as if it were a chaise lounge instead of a gnarled clump of roots.

"Such a pity you would not join us," he said with a sigh of deep, unconvincing melancholy.

"You had plenty of fun without me," I told him, pulling the helmet into my lap and playing with it, tapping a quick, staccato rhythm with my fingertips that echoed nicely inside, like a kettle drum. "But it looks like Antiva knows how to party."

"Ah, that we do," he sighed, gazing skyward for a moment in fond recollection. "The best wines, the most talented whores..."

"And the deadliest assassins?" I suggested.

"Not _that_ deadly," Alistair muttered.

"Such slander!" Zevran laid a wrist over his brow in mock hurt, and I laughed, then thought of something Duncan had said.

"Isn't Antiva a really long way away?" I asked, frowning. "How did you get here?"

"I was in the area," he began breezily.

"And thought you'd stop in and do a little murdering?" Alistair cut him off with a sharp grin.

"Now, boys, don't fight," I said in my best imitation of Wynne, who looked up sharply from the book she'd been reading before shrugging and going back to it.

"As I was saying before I was so rudely -"

"- _cleverly _-"

"- interrupted," Zevran continued despite Alistair's interjection, "Antiva is indeed a long journey. My city, Antiva City, lies as a glittering gem in the heart of the Antivan desert."

I pictured this. I'd never seen a desert and my mental image looked a lot like Dust Town and its gritty, sandy floor, except with camels – which I also hadn't seen, and so they looked like deformed horses. I doubted Antiva was anything at all like my imaginings.

"Tell me more," I urged, shifting around so I faced him and starting to lean forward to listen, but Alistair slid closer to me and touched my shoulder, tugging me back to lean on him instead. I did, and smiled up at him, delighted at being invited to touch him, even though it seemed odd that he wouldn't be shy in front of Zevran when he was shy in front of everyone else.

Zevran watched the exchange with the easy amusement that seemed to be his default expression. When I turned back to him, he began describing a land of sun and flowers, spicy food and strong wine, tight clothes and loose women.

"But what I miss most is the leather," he finished dreamily. "The smell, you see. I lived in a tiny apartment where the Crows kept their recruits, packed in like crates, near the leather district. Even now, that smell is what makes me think of home."

I nodded. "I like the smell of leather, too."

He laughed. "I am not speaking of the smell of leather once it has been made into something beautiful, though I love that as well. No, I mean the stink of the rotting hides as they are treated, and the reek of the tannin. That Is a bit stranger, no?"

"Not really. Smells are emotional things. I used deepstalker crap to keep darkspawn from tracking me in the Deep Roads, and eventually its smell was a comfort to me. It meant I was safe – saf_er,_ anyway." I winced slightly when I remembered a time it hadn't worked, and Alistair's hand on my shoulder tightened in reassurance.

Shortly thereafter, everyone sought their beds except Alistair, who'd asked for first watch again. I rummaged around in my tent with my blankets, annoying Rocky while I tried to get comfortable, but music gets me all worked up and the exiting talk of foreign lands and darkspawn hadn't helped; I really wasn't sleepy. Prompted by Rocky's disgusted look after I elbowed him in the ribs _again_, I gave up and crawled out of my tent to visit with Alistair.

He sat leaning on a stump with his long legs stretched out in front of him, his Templar manual on his lap. He smiled at me as I knelt next to him and peered at his book. It lay open to an illustration of a Templar making some sort of gesture while blue magic dripped off of another Templar, who looked grateful.

"Why aren't you in armor?" I asked, realizing he was sitting his watch in his casual clothes.

"I washed it and oiled it," he said, pointing to where it was laid out to dry. "I'll put it on later. I got sick of hearing about how bad it smells."

I eyed him speculatively for a moment, and then, moving with purpose so he wouldn't have time to object, I slithered under his arm and sat between his knees, propping the book up on my lap. "See, I'm helpful," I told him, leaning back against his chest. "I'm a book rest."

"If you were taller, you'd be a chin rest, too," he teased, his breath tickling my hair.

I scooted my butt backwards, closer to him, so I'd be higher up against his chest. He drew in his breath sharply and I stopped. "Is this bad?"

"No, it's just – You're a little distracting." I could feel his nervousness in the tightness of his muscles, and he held his arms awkwardly, trying to hold onto his book without touching me too much. Probably some misguided attempt at being respectful.

"So what is this picture?" I asked, tracing the spray of blue goop with my fingertip. My theory was, if I was patient and persistent, eventually he would relax. So far, it seemed to be working.

"Cleansing," he said, sounding relieved to talk about business. "A powerful Templar can dispel curses from his allies."

"That sounds like magic. How is that not magic? Templars aren't mages... Are they?"

"We're not creating new magic, we're manipulating existing magic," he explained, and launched into an extremely dry and technical treatise on how this thing was supposed to work and why it wasn't magic.

_Wow, that backfired_, I thought. _This is incredibly boring._ I stopped paying attention to his words in favor of the warm and muscled body at my back.

My hands on the page looked so delicate next to his. I knew that many dwarven men could break my arm in one fist; my fine bones and narrow frame had always been a liability, another reason to say on guard. But now... Alistair was at least as strong as any other man I'd ever known, and a foot taller, but instead of feeling vulnerable, I felt cherished and feminine. His arms around me were better than a fortress.

I nestled a little deeper into his safe haven and rested my cheek on his chest. His heart pounded like he'd been running instead of discussing Templar technique.

"You're not listening," he said eventually.

"You're a little distracting." I tilted my head up to smile at him, and realized that our faces were _really close_.

"Hi Latitia, you can't sleep either?" Leliana stuck her _extremely unwelcome_ head out of her tent and came over to sit beside us. I sighed irritably, the moment lost.

"I had so much fun with you tonight," she said, sitting beside us.

"Mm-hmm." I sighed again. "Zevran's a funny guy, isn't he? And I don't necessarily mean funny 'ha-ha,' more like funny 'wow I can't believe he did that.'"

"I know, right? Hey, what are you looking at?" She scooted closer and leaned on me to peer at the book, and I felt Alistair tense in obvious discomfort at her invading his space.

Suddenly I was mad at them both. Couldn't Leliana _tell_ she was interrupting? Couldn't Alistair just _relax_ for _five sodding minutes_? I mean, losing a 'moment' wouldn't be such a big deal if 'moments' weren't rarer than diamonds with this guy!

I stood up abruptly, handed Alistair his book and started for my tent. "Thanks for the company, guys, but I think I'm finally ready for bed. I better get some sleep before my watch."

"Oh, okay... Goodnight, then," Alistair said, watching me duck under my tent flap.

"'Night!" Leliana chirped, and I heard her slip back into her own tent.

"Mission accomplished, cock-blocker," I muttered. Rocky lifted an ear at me.

But, lying in my dark tent, away from the man and his _distraction_, I had to admit that I wasn't in any kind of hurry to get to the more significant "steamy bits." Sex, in my experience, was either boring or bloody terrifying – which I knew wasn't normal. Deep down, I feared that something was wrong with me, that I was broken inside.

That I was damaged goods, and no one would want me.

So if Alistair wanted to wait until we were old and gray before showing me his tool, then that was just fine by me. But I did like kisses, damn it, and I hadn't even gotten _one_ yet. What was up with that?

"Why are kisses so hard to get, Rocky?" I asked him idly, stroking his soft ears. He blinked sleepily at me, then lunged and licked me right on the mouth.

"Ugh," I complained, wiping my face on my blanket. "Thanks, but you're not really my type. I think we should just be friends." He thumped the ground with his stumpy tail.


	30. Into the Forest

_Many, many effusive thanks to all my readers and reviewers, especially mille libri who is responsible for this chapter not being completely bizarre and confusing!_

* * *

We traveled along the road for another day, entertained by Zevran and Leliana's not-so-subtle competition to tell the best stories, before Rocky pointed out a strange sort of path into the woods. We stood around staring at the odd scar in the forest and scratching our heads.

"Are you sure this is it?" I asked the dog, and he gave me an offended look. "Sorry. Of course you are."

"I can't bring the wagon in there," Bodahn said. "Look at that. How did they ever get their landships in?"

The bank of trees and plants continued almost without interruption along the side of the road, but where Rocky had caught the scent, the earth had buckled; somehow, the ground had suffered an upheaval or a cracking and then settled back together. The smooth green moss had broken, and here and there, a tree root stuck out through the crack, like a grasping hand. We could see the mark easily enough, but couldn't imagine how anything larger than a person could have squeezed through the trees.

"Do you want to take your wagon back to the Crossing?" I asked Bodahn. "Or wait here for us?"

He thought about it. "I don't think it'd be safe here for me and my boy alone. I think we'll have to meet you back there. I'm sorry, really. If there's anything else I can do for you..."

"You've done enough," I told him. "You carry all our junk and you let me borrow your stuff and you know all the good inns. We'll meet you at the Crossing when we're done. Um... Wynne?"

The mage looked over at me from where she'd been gathering up her tent. "Yes?"

"Are you sure you want to do this? You could stay with Bodahn."

She scowled at me and I realized I'd made a mistake. "No," she said sarcastically. "I'm old and don't know my own mind. I should be on a porch under a blanket, being fed pudding and other easily digestible food."

"Is that an option?" I asked brightly. "Because that sounds pretty good, actually."

She chuckled and turned back to her bag. "I wish. No, I will see this through."

And so we gathered up the minimum we needed for camping plus combat gear, and started on our way. Rocky took the lead, sniffing the ground and wagging with joy at having important work to do. The sheer density of living things was beyond my ability to fully grasp, and I kept my eyes on his wagging tail-stub, because if I looked around too much at all the trembling leaves, I got dizzy.

We traveled deeper and deeper into the Forest's cloying richness, its excess of life layered on life and all built on its rotting ancestors. We walked on a narrow trail between walls of teeming growth that scratched and clawed and strangled each other to survive in desperate competition, and with a horrible chill I realized I hadn't seen even a small pebble in miles.

Gripped with sudden terror, I reached out in search of the _not-space_ feeling of living Stone, and found nothing.

Nothing!

"What is it? What's wrong?"

I focused with some difficulty on the worried Warden in front of me and realized I had stopped walking. "There's no Stone," I told him, knowing even as I said it that it sounded stupid and he wouldn't understand.

"We're in the forest," he said.

"You don't understand, there's _no Stone_," I repeated, gripping his arms and staring up at him, wild-eyed. "It's – it's buried under all this disgusting rotting dead stuff. All this dirt! I can't _find_ it!"

"Is that a problem?" he asked with a frown. I could see him trying to think of some way to make it better, and behind him, the other members of our party clustered around curiously.

I took a deep breath and tried to focus. I didn't need to know where the Stone was. I would not get lost. I did not need to feel the Tunnel; I wasn't in a tunnel.

"Sorry," I said to the group at large. "Sorry. Dwarf thing. I'm – I _will_ be fine. It's just a bit of a shock, that's all. It's sort of disorienting."

"We'll stay on this path and we won't get lost," Leliana assured me, putting a steadying arm around my waist. "If we can't find the Dalish, we'll go back."

I smiled gratefully at her, and we started back down the path. Alistair walked on my other side and I gripped his hand like a lifeline.

But we didn't find the Dalish before the deep shadows under the trees brought an early nightfall. Dusk deepened into blackness with alarming speed and we found ourselves struggling to make camp in the dark. When Alistair finally got the fire going, a sort of hiss seemed to spread through the trees, and I almost thought they leaned back, away from the flames as their leaves rustled in the still air.

I sensed a vitality here, a sort of composite life force almost like my Stone but dreadfully alien to me, radiating unwelcome that promised to become open hostility at a moment's notice. If I died here, would the trees eat me? I shuddered back from the thought, absently stepping on Alistair's heel as I followed him around the campsite.

"Careful," he warned good-naturedly, helping me gather up the firewood I'd made him drop.

"Sorry," I mumbled, embarrassed.

The others were kind to me that night and let me fuss with my tent and sharpen my daggers instead of helping with chores. Then after dinner, Leliana knelt behind me and started brushing my hair, and I was enjoying the sleepy luxury of it. Figures she'd have brought a real hairbrush. I'd been combing it with my fingers since leaving Orzammar, and between that and the constant hat-hair, my 'crowning glory' had become an embarrassment.

"Not that it's ever gonna be all that nice," I muttered, thinking aloud.

"What?" Leliana asked, leaning forward so her cheek brushed mine.

"Nothing, just complaining about my hair. It's so boring. Dull old mouse brown, and so thin and limp."

"Thin? Maybe by dwarven standards, but compared to humans it's thick," she told me, letting it slide through her fingers. "And it's not plain brown, it's got sun-streaks in it now. It'll be almost blonde by the end of the summer, I bet. It's bleaching really fast, probably for the same reason you get sunburned so easily."

"Blonde? Really?" I tried to pull some of it around to look, but chin-length hair is hard to get a good look at. "That'd be nice. My sister's hair is bright red. Like, redder than ruby. She's gorgeous."

"Such a shame, then, that she is doomed to live in the shadow of your beauty," Zevran said, pouncing on an opportunity to flash his pearly whites at me. "Truly, the day you left Orzammar was a dark day for your people. One can only hope they can find the strength to move on and find love elsewhere."

I rolled my eyes. "Hush, you. Leliana! Regale us with tales of the Brecilian Forest and the Dalish. I know you've been wanting to. Go ahead and let it out."

She beamed and launched into a semi-historical narrative laced with personal touches, tragic figures, forbidden love and betrayal.

"So let me get this straight," I said finally, when her story wound to a close. "The humans showed up with a splintery dildo and said 'C'mere knife-ears,' and the elves just bent over and _took_ it. They didn't even _try_ to fight?"

"The humans were too strong," she tried to explain, but I interrupted her with some heat.

"How can the human invasion be worse than the darkspawn? My people have fought for centuries and we will _never_ give up! We will stand to the last! Why do we waste our time on cowards who refuse to defend their homes?"

"We cannot blame the elves of today for the defeat of their forebears. They are not their downtrodden ancestors," Zevran said, leaning forward to join the debate. "I would think you, of all people, would understand that."

Surprised by his sudden intensity, I hesitated, but still insisted, "The Ancestors are our heritage and one of the things we fought to protect."

"You misunderstand me," he said in a voice like a silk-wrapped dagger. "Would you have me think you weak, because of the casteless you left behind? Or would you prefer I see the truth?"

I blinked, and backed down. _Zevran_ was an elf. "Sorry. I'm – I'm not feeling myself right now."

Zevran's demeanor reverted instantly to his usual ease, and he leaned back on his elbows, rolling his gaze around the campsite in exaggerated disgust. "Indeed. The forest is so very... dirty."

"Stone's mercy, yes! Dirt! And plants everywhere, and _bugs_!" I shuddered, and he laughed. Soon we all sought our tents, and that was that for the night.

* * *

The actual line dividing day from night was blurred, here beneath the verdant canopy, and our compatriots woke one at a time as their internal clocks told them the sun was up even though shadows still lay heavily upon their tents. We ate breakfast, packed our gear, shouldered our bags, walked on. I swabbed at the back of my neck sometime around mid-morning, grumbling to myself about the humidity here in the forest as the temperature rose steadily.

"It's roasting today," Alistair commiserated as he pulled off a gauntlet to wipe at his face.

"Not roasting. More... _braising,_" I said with a wry smile.

He laughed, but stopped when he saw me wince and try to dry off the skin under my pack's straps. "Is your bag too heavy for you?"

"It's kind of chafing," I admitted, then immediately regretted it because now _of course_ he would try to carry my bag for me.

"Let me take it for a while," he said predictably, reaching for it.

I sidestepped away from him. "No. Your bag is already heavier than mine."

"Gimme the bag!" He reached for it again, and I ducked, giggling.

"Fine then," he said, grinning, and he lunged and caught me around the waist, tossing me over his shoulders on top of his backpack.

"Okay, you win!" I laughed and struggled to keep my pack from sliding up over my head. "You can have my bag!"

"I don't want it anymore." He started off after Rocky with me draped across his shoulders like a scarf.

"You can't just carry me the whole way -" I began, but was cut off by Rocky's deep, throaty growl. Alistair set me back down quickly (but gently) and went for his sword.

"What's wrong?" I asked the dog, who was staring off into the shrubs. He gave me a frustrated look, as though angry at his inability to speak, and touched a mark on the ground with his nose, whining. Morrigan approached and bent to look at it. She inhaled deeply, as though scenting it, and frowned.

"It smells like a wolf, but 'tis like no wolf print I've seen," she said as though offended by the impertinence of the strange mark.

Rocky trotted in a gradually widening circle, stopping occasionally to snuffle and growl, pointing out more prints to Morrigan. Eventually he woofed and trotted off in a specific direction, and Morrigan followed; after a few seconds I heard her footsteps change from two feet to four, and she disappeared.

"Most intriguing," Zevran said in a slightly awed voice.

"Oh, yeah, sorry, she's a shapeshifter," I told him. "She can do a raven, too, and probably other things."

"Other things, hmm?" He smiled slyly. "Now that does open up some interesting possibilities."

"Do you turn everything into some sick joke?" Alistair demanded.

"I try," said Zevran modestly.

Then we heard the approach of our scouts and Morrigan appeared through the underbrush, dusting off her hands. "Whatever these beast are," she said, "they hunt the Dalish."

"Well that's too bad, we have dibs," I said, putting my hands on my hips.

Morrigan huffed, her quiet little almost-laugh. "Try explaining that to _them_. We had best hurry."

So we started off again, and I had to add a sort of skip to every third step to keep up. Alistair eventually reached over and grabbed my pack, jerking it off my shoulders and slinging it over his own before I could react. I thought about complaining, but I was too busy trying not to trip or stick myself on thorns.

But we still hadn't found them when the light began to fade, the shards of sunlight that made it through the canopy turning golden and soft, and Wynne had just broached the subject of camping when Rocky stopped and started growling again. Morrigan held up a hand for silence, and then we all heard it: Rustling leaves, the unnatural silence of frightened birds, the occasional pat of a paw touching earth.

"I do not think making camp here would be wise," she said dryly, and we started off into the gathering twilight, weapons in hand.

And then, just as the air had turned blue and the shadows crept over us, we saw a flicker of orange torchlight in the distance. With a collective sigh of relief, we jogged the last distance towards the encampment and suddenly found ourselves surrounded by pointy things.

"Drop your weapons!" A woman's harsh command came from the trees above me, and I looked up to see a broadhead arrow aimed at my heart.


	31. The Dalish

"Drop your weapons, _now_," repeated the hard-eyed female elf in form-fitting leather armor perched on a low branch above me. Her armor was laughable, but her bow looked heavy enough to pierce steel. Her companions ranged themselves around us, arrows on the strings.

"We'd best do as she commands," Zevran whispered in my ear, and I obeyed, sheathing my daggers and raising my hands. The others did the same, with varying degrees of willingness. Alistair would not put away his shield, but she let that pass.

"Now," she said, jumping lightly down from her tree branch and approaching to just out of arm's reach. "I suggest you explain yourselves immediately. What are shemlen doing here, tracking the Dalish?"

Now that I could see her better, I noticed her elaborate, curly tattoos, her bare belly and the soft, strappy leather skirt and tried not to laugh at its impracticality. "We're Gray Wardens and need to talk to your boss," I told her instead, holding my hands up.

"Boss?" she sneered. "We kneel to no _boss_. Why would I believe you are Gray Wardens?"

"I think you should let your -" I began, and hesitated.

"_Keeper_," prompted Leliana in my ear, and I finished, "- your Keeper decide whether we're telling the truth. He'll be unhappy if you send us away without asking him first."

She frowned a little, looking uncertain for the first time, and finally made a curt gesture for us to follow her as she turned and strode towards the beckoning firelight. "Come, then," she said over her shoulder. "But know that our arrows are trained on you."

The path suddenly sloped up and became rough, the trees oddly clumped-together and their roots arching upwards like bent knees. Then we reached a crest of sorts and saw that the ground itself had wrinkled up like an accordion, folding itself away to clear a smooth, flat area in the middle of the forest. The earthworks, tough with tree roots and nigh-impenetrable, provided a perfect defensive position, and the trees' interlaced branches formed a cathedral-like canopy for the veritable city that lay spread out before us.

Our guide stopped for a moment and turned to watch our faces as we took this in, smiling smugly. Alistair's mouth hung open and I'm sure mine did too, Zevran's eyes burned with eagerness to explore, and Leliana and Wynne both drew deep, awed breaths. Morrigan, of course, pretended not to be impressed, but her hand reached out to touch one of the bent roots with reverence for the awesome magical power involved in moving an entire acre of forest.

"So this is how they get through the forest?" Alistair said finally, his voice awed. "They trees just... get out of their way?"

Our guide sniffed and turned to lead us down into the clearing. "A typical ignorant observation. The truth is much more sophisticated."

We followed her swaying hips as she led us through the elaborate encampment. Each landship, or small clump of landships, had its own mini-camp, all decked out with little statues of elven deities, potted herbs and spice plants, woven rugs and folding furniture that looked surprisingly comfortable. Long strings of miniature lanterns made of colored glass hung between the wagons and made the whole camp sparkle.

I tried to see everything without staring too obviously, but Alistair rubbernecked as we passed a pair of lithe elven girls clad in the same scanty leather and bending over to tend a roasting boar. I nudged his elbow, grinning. "Roll up your tongue before you get us kicked out of camp, 'shem.'"

He flushed to the roots of his hair and stared at his boots until we reached the Keeper, a tall man with a shiny bald head and proud bearing.

Our guide spoke at length to the Keeper in fractured elvish, a complicated language that I suspected would tie my tongue in knots if I tried it. I caught the words "Warden" and "shem" more than once, though. Finally, she ducked her head in polite acknowledgment of her Keeper's orders before running easily back to her post.

"I am Zathrian, Keeper of this clan," he introduced himself then, speaking to Alistair, assuming he was in charge as most people did. I blinked in surprise at the softness and gentleness of his voice, having expected a loud, brash commander's bark. "I presume you are here to tell me of the Blight. There is no need; I have felt it myself. I would already have moved my people north, but we have had... difficulties."

Rocky came forward then, placing himself between Zathrian and his people with a sharp warning bark. Zathrian fixed him with a cold glare and said, "And you have a hound. As if we haven't had enough trouble with such beasts."

"Yes, it seems you've had your own problems. What are the odds?" Alistair said dryly. I scolded Rocky under my breath, grabbing his collar before he could offend anyone worse, and decided Alistair had been in charge long enough.

"Please excuse them," I said, bowing my head politely. "Yes, we're here to discuss the Blight. We had hoped to call in your aid, as promised in the old treaties. What happened? Did darkspawn come into the Forest?"

Zathrian sighed. "No. Follow me."

We did, and he showed us to an inner circle of camp, where narrow cots had been laid out in rings around blazing fires, every cot occupied with the groaning wounded. Bite and claw wounds decorated their bodies, what little I could see that wasn't covered in bloody bandages. Wynne uttered a soft cry and she dashed forward to examine them more closely.

"Not two days ago, we were ambushed by werewolves," Zathrian told us, his soft voice hardening with hatred for the enemies of his people. Morrigan sighed with contentment at finally knowing what the odd wolfish things had been. "It is too soon to know how many of our hunters are infected with their curse, but I fear soon we will have to slay many of our own wounded, lest they become beasts themselves."

I stared at the dozens of grubby cots, trying to ignore the stink of blood and fever sweat, and the flies attracted to the soiled bandages. "What would you have us do?"

Zathrian settled back on his heels, looking satisfied. "Go into the forest and kill the source, the great white wolf we call Witherfang. Bring me his heart, and I may cure this curse forever. I cannot risk any more of my own people on this."

"Ah, but we are expendable," Zevran murmured from right behind me. "How refreshingly familiar."

"'But – go into the forest? Where? How can we hope to find a beast in its home territory if it doesn't want to be found? What if we get lost?" My heart pounded with sudden terror, and I scrubbed at my face with my hands to distract myself from the thought of venturing into the trackless forest with no Stone to guide me home again. "Can't you send us a guide or something?"

"I cannot spare any hunters," Zathrian frowned. "But if you look for the white wolves, they are his eyes and ears, and... Hmm." He paused and looked across the camp to a larger fire with a cluster of boys around it, looking to range in age from about twelve to perhaps eighteen. "Take Cammen with you. He is young, but his pathfinding is excellent. Now, if you will excuse me, I have much to do. You understand."

"Wait," I called, trotting after him with Alistair jingling along behind me as Zathrian strode back to his landship. "Can't you tell me any more about these things?"

"They are mindless, ravening beasts, no more intelligent than a rabid dog," he said harshly over his shoulder. "This ambush was a surprise. Such organization should be beyond them. It is a fluke."

"What if we get bitten? Will we die?"

"Not all become infected. You will know within a day or two, although everyone reacts differently. You will begin to sweat and vomit, and your temper will become violent and unpredictable. If that happens, I suggest you hurry. Your quest will have become rather _personal_ at that point." Zathrian shot a sly smile at me and I missed a step, suddenly frightened of the power that radiated from him. "Now," he continued, as though nothing had happened. "If you have further questions, you may speak to Lanaya, my first." He gestured toward a woman in fur-trimmed leather in ceremonial colors.

"That was interesting," Alistair said quietly; he must have sensed Zathrian's sleeping power, too.

"This is awful! Wander around in the woods looking for a diseased wolf? Do we really need the Dalish? Can't we just go?" I begged, grasping his hand.

He blinked, startled. "Uh, we kind of do, yeah. I mean, so far we have an arling with no arl and the warmed-up leftovers of the Circle of Magi. I don't know about you, but I'd like more than that at my back when we fight the Archdemon."

Lanaya approached us then, giving us both a polite nod. "Zathrian says you are to stay here tonight. Will you need anything?"

"Just space to set up camp," Alistair replied. She pointed beyond a corral filled with pretty white halla. "Thank you."

We gathered the others and set up our usual circle of tents, where the folded earth had sort of wrinkled and created a quite private little nook. Night had fallen in earnest, but the sounds of the Dalish going about their business and the cheeping of insects kept me awake, and fidgety.

"You're going to wear a groove in the ground," Alistair said, watching me pace around the campfire.

"I can hardly blame her, these crickets are rather annoying," Zevran said from the reclining chair he'd conned off of one of the Dalish women. "Give me good city noise any day."

"You mean like, _Help! Murder! Call the guards!_" Alistair imitated a terrified woman's voice, and Zevran laughed.

"I would hope to be far gone before that particular sound was heard," he chuckled.

"Someday you will teach me a few of your tricks, oh sneaky one," I told him. I'd stopped pacing and started playing with my daggers, rolling them over the backs of my fingers.

"I would be only _too_ glad," he purred, looking me up and down. I chucked a pine cone at him, which he ducked, laughing again.

"That's not what I meant and you know it," I said sternly. "Tell you what – I'm not tired – I'll teach you that thing I did to break your arm, all right? Then you'll _owe_ me."

"No thanks," he shook his head. "I like having unbroken arms."

"Teach _me_," Alistair said then, standing up quickly. I hesitated, not sure that was a good idea, but he looked so hopeful.

"Okay," I said dubiously. "Um... But first you have to learn how to fall. I've seen you fall and you rely too much on your armor and half the time you get tangled up or hurt."

"Fine," he said, flushing, and tried to smile. "But I wouldn't expect _falling down_ to be a skill. I mean, I've been doing it all my life and nobody ever taught _me_."

"That much is obvious," Zevran commented, and I shot him a quelling glare.

I kicked all the debris away from a wide area of the camp and demonstrated the proper, evenly distributed rolling fall, forwards and backwards. Zevran applauded and I told him to shut it. Then I told Alistair to try.

"Ow," he said a moment later, when he'd gotten his breath back after his first attempt knocked the wind out of him. "What did I do wrong?"

"You're, uh... You're using too much muscle, I think. A lot of strong men do that. You need to use just enough to redirect the force, not so much you flip yourself over. Try it again, from your knees this time so you won't get hurt."

He got stuck halfway and fell over sideways. "This isn't working."

I helped him up and dusted him off. "You'll learn. It's my fault, I'm not teaching you very well. Um... Try -"

"I think I should practice this another time," he muttered. "When I have a smaller audience."

I looked around and realized the other members of our group had poked their heads out of their tents to watch, and blushed in sympathy. "I do want to teach you," I told him quietly. "I hate seeing you hurt. We'll try again another time, okay?"

He nodded and excused himself to wash the dirt out of his hair.

"Oh, very well," Zevran said then, unwinding himself from his chair and standing up. "If you insist, you may teach me your_ weirding ways_."

"How gracious of you to indulge me." I rolled my eyes, then set my feet into my usual fighting stance, telling him to do the same. He pretended to strike, and I grasped his wrist and pulled, taking control of his balance and throwing him forward. He rolled and came to his feet, grinning.

"Very nice," he said. "I feel as though I'm in back in the academy. Again?"

I demonstrated a few more times, then let him practice on me. He had trouble with the difference in our heights at first, but he figured it out soon enough. Then we took turns, me giving him advice as he refined his technique and built muscle memory.

"Who taught you this? Is there some Dust Town fighting academy I do not know about?" he asked as he threw me past him again.

I bounced back to my feet – 'bounce' really does describe it, I thought, whereas Zevran sort of _flows_ – and turned in time to catch his blow and send him flying. "My friend Leske. He and his friends worked out a whole system for enforcing 'discipline' among the people the Carta controlled." I grunted as I hit the ground a little too hard, but recovered. "I didn't bother to learn very much, since I don't get in as many barroom brawls."

"When will you – oof," Zevran lost his balance a little too soon but turned it into a sort of somersault, drawing admiring looks from Leliana. "When will you show me the last bit, where you break my arm?"

"It's not very useful," I admitted. "Unless you practice all the time, you'll never be able to make it work. I only managed it because Morrigan slowed you down. But if you insist-"

"No I don't! I don't insist!"

But I already had him, and this time I didn't release his wrist but instead placed my other palm on his elbow, locking it and throwing him face-down instead of letting him roll. I broke his fall, though, letting him down easy, and pinned him with one knee on his elbow and the other on his back.

"That could have been worse," he observed, muffled by the ground. I let him up, laughing, and we dusted ourselves off before finally seeking our beds.

* * *

Very early the next morning, a timid voice called, "Um, hello? Gray Wardens?"

I grumbled and rubbed at my eyes, finally managing to crawl to the tent flap and push it aside. "I'm one of them. What's up?"

The eldest of the teenagers I'd seen last night, pointed out to me by Zathrian, crouched in the middle of our camp. He looked at me with large, hopeful eyes, like a puppy's, in a round face. "I'm Cammen. Zathrian says I'm supposed to help you?"

"Oh. Yes. Thank you." I made myself smile at him, so clearly nervous of the strangers, despite the unholy early hour. "I'm Latitia, and this dog here is Rocky. I'll introduce the others when they wake up. Would you care to join us for breakfast?"

"Um, actually, I was going to invite _you_ to join _us_," he said in a rush, the tips of his long ears turning pink. "It's ready now. I mean, if you want."

"Oh! Thanks! Just give us a minute. Rocky, go wake Alistair, please." My dog huffed and heaved himself to his feet, putting on a masterful performance as 'Dog Who Nobody Properly Appreciates And Who Should Still Be In Bed.' As I climbed out of my tent, I heard a muffled yelp from Alistair's, followed by, "Urgh, Rocky! Not on the lips!"

When everyone had emerged yawning from their tents, we followed Cammen to the campfire he'd been at last night. The flames had settled overnight, but a flowery-smelling tea bubbled in a pot over the coals. Cammen introduced us to the group of teenagers, saying they were all apprentice hunters, before pouring tea for everyone. The younger boys muttered shy greetings and scooted over on the benches to make room for us. I noticed that Cammen was the oldest by at least a year, maybe two.

Breakfast was berries, nuts, and a thick, white, sour goop. "Halla yogurt," Cammen told me when I prodded it with my spoon, and I thanked him and forced myself to eat it because I didn't want to hurt his feelings, and because Alistair was eating his with every sign of enjoyment, so it must be good.

"So what do we do now?" I asked Cammen while I took a break from the dreadful yogurt.

"We hunt the werewolves. They are large beasts and easy to track," he replied confidently.

"Cammen can track anything," said the smallest boy with typical youthful hero-worship.

"Not that it does him any good, eh, Cammen?" laughed a broad-shouldered young man, elbowing Cammen in the ribs.

"Leave it, Thorell," Cammen snapped, flushing. I hid my amusement behind a spoonful of horrible yogurt. Boys, it seemed, were the same all over.

After breakfast, Cammen stood around looking awkward while we packed up our tents and supplies until we were ready to leave. But before we left, Wynne pulled me aside.

"I wish to stay here and heal the injured," she told me. "I cannot cure the curse, but perhaps, if I heal their wounds, their bodies will be stronger and better able to resist."

"That's a good idea," I agreed. "We don't know how long we'll be gone, and we don't want to come back with a bloody heart to find everyone has already died."

Se we left her behind and followed Cammen out through the gate, past a different group of guards and into the forest. I watched him step confidently through the underbrush and wondered about him. He'd been fairly vibrating with nervousness and fear, and yet at the same time oddly eager and intense. Then he stopped, going down on one knee to examine a print in the soft earth, and transformed in an instant from timid boy to stalking predator.

* * *

_Many thanks to interesting2125, serenbach, Eva Galana, Enaid Aderyn, Nithu, Fluid Consciousness, Arsinoe de Blassenville and everyone else who has read, favorited, alerted and reviewed – you guys are the most powerful force in the Realms. _

_Also special thanks to mille libri who helped prevent the entire Dalish story arc from dissolving into absurdity._


	32. The Hunters Hunted

_What can I say? You're awesome. Thanks for coming along for the ride!_

* * *

Cammen led us quickly through the forest and I kept my eyes on his back and my fingers wedged into Alistair's sword belt, hanging on for dear life and trying not to think about the vast, pathless wilderness. Alistair ruffled my hair affectionately and was probably trying to give me a reassuring smile, but I didn't want to risk looking around to see it. The others ranged along behind me, except for Rocky who padded at Cammen's heels, excited at the chase.

"How long until we catch up to them?" I asked the hunter apprentice.

"We will not," he replied absently. "They run while we walk. Instead, we will find their lair and catch them there. By then, they will know we hunt them."

"How? Zathrian says they're just mindless beasts."

He hesitated, then said softly, "Lately they have not behaved as beasts."

Late in the day, as dusk began to drape itself across the forest, Cammen stopped short and held up a hand. I strained to see around him and find out why he'd stopped, and there stood a sleek red deer with gracefully spreading antlers, barely twenty paces away. Cammen drew his bow with exquisite care to avoid startling the animal, nocked a bladed arrow, drew and aimed. And waited.

I stood directly behind him, my eyes level with his arrow, and I could see he had a perfect shot. The animal raised its lovely head and gazed at him with liquid brown eyes and I wondered why he didn't fire. Sweat gathered on the back of his neck and his arm trembled as he held the arrow, and waited, and waited. Finally Rocky gave an eager whine, prancing a bit in impatience; the deer bolted, flashing its white tail at us, and the dog leaped in pursuit. Cammen slung his bow over his shoulder with a disgusted sigh.

"Maybe Rocky will catch it," I suggested, seeing his disappointment.

"He won't." He started down the trail again, his shoulders tight. "He'll catch up after he realizes the deer is too fast for him."

"Why didn't you shoot?" Leliana asked. "You had a perfect shot!"

"The... The wind wasn't right," he mumbled, not looking at her.

"It was fine! It was perfect," she insisted, but he just shrugged.

We soon made camp in a fern-filled clearing, and Rocky caught up in time for dinner, panting and happy at chasing prey in the woods, even if he hadn't caught anything. After he'd finished his soup, Cammen stood up and strung his bow.

"May I go hunt?" he asked, looking at my feet instead of my eyes.

"Sure, whatever you want. Fresh meat is always nice." I gave him an encouraging smile; he left and melted into the trees like a ghost. I was impressed.

He came back around midnight, red and sweaty and empty-handed, and rolled himself in his blankets without a word.

We hunted the weres for three more days and the trail grew colder and colder, slowing us down. Every night Cammen hunted, and every night he came back with nothing. I began, not to relax exactly, but to ignore the phobia as the novelty of the forest wore off; there's only so much terror a body can manage, after all.

So on the fourth day, I was walking with Zevran, laughing at a story about a humorous training mishap with the Crows. I got the impression that the reality had been much less funny and much more cruel and disgusting, but if he wanted to repaint his past with humor, then I was ready to laugh – and so the massive gray shape that hurtled out of the shrubs and tackled Rocky took us all by surprise.

The creature had thick, shaggy fur on its whole body, a wolflike muzzle and fluffy tail, but its hind legs were long and thick and it looked as though it could have walked on two legs as easily as it now ran on four. Its fingers, much too long for a natural wolf, ended in long yellow claws, and it roared a battle call halfway between a human's shout and a wolf's howl.

All this I saw in the bare instant before it struck the warhound and the two animals rolled across the ground and crashed into a tree, a tangle of snarling fangs and slashing claws. I drew my daggers but feared I'd stab the wrong canid, so frantic was their struggle, and in desperation, I snatched the long tail and yanked on it. The werewolf whipped its head around to snap at my hand, and Rocky sank his fangs into its jugular.

Then the other wolves arrived.

One leaped at Morrigan and bore her to the ground beneath him. I ducked my own attacker, who'd misjudged my height and tumbled inelegantly into the bushes. I darted under Alistair's shield, raised in mid-bash as he battled his own wolf, and ran for Morrigan. Her wolf shuddered and stiffened when she managed to bring her magic to bear on it, and I stamped hard on the back of its neck, cracking it before the beast thawed.

I bent to help her get out from under it, when my own wolf caught up to me and hit me from behind. He bit down on my shoulder, piercing the leather and crushing me to the ground. I struggled to get my hands and knees under me, and then the wolf was nothing but dead weight on my back as it collapsed.

Silence fell as the werewolves' failed attack ended after – what, ten seconds? A very _intense_ ten seconds. I heard Alistair's boots behind me and he heaved the massive beast off my back, and the fletching of an arrow protruding from the base of its skull. I looked around and saw Cammen still holding his bow, frozen in shock.

"I think you just saved my life," I told him, wincing as I began to unbuckle my leathers and expose the wound. "Thank you."

"I... I killed him," he whispered, wide-eyed.

"And I'm alive because you did." I gazed at him for a moment in puzzlement, before Alistair distracted me by pulling my armor off over my head. I swore at him, at some length.

"Sorry," he muttered, blushing. "I'm just – I'm going to put salve on this bite, okay? Hold still."

While he carefully pushed aside the torn cloth and worked the salve into the punctures, I took stock of the others. Zevran seemed fine, and was fastidiously cleaning his daggers. Leliana had scratches on one arm but seemed more concerned by the damage to her new leather jerkin she'd bought from the Dalish. Rocky was holding up one paw and bore deeper scratches on his shoulders. But Morrigan was worst off.

"That's enough, it's Morrigan's turn," I told Alistair, taking the salve away from him and kneeling beside her. She had one hand clamped over her other arm right below the shoulder, clenching it tightly against the flow of blood, her skin dangerously pale.

"May I?" I asked her, remembering her offense when I'd touched her without permission when she'd been burned in Redcliffe. She nodded, biting her lip, and let go. Blood pumped from a torn artery and I had to work my fingers all the way in, because the blood kept washing the elfroot away before it would heal. The air around us turned frosty and the blood on the ground froze solid when I gave up and just shoved a whole glob of ointment into the wound. The bleeding finally slowed, and the air warmed again as Morrigan regained control of her pain.

"I should skin him," Cammen said then.

It was such a non sequitur that I stared at him blankly for a second before asking, "What?"

"If I bring back the pelt, I'll be made a full hunter," he said, sounding oddly detached, but he made no move toward the dead monster.

Alistair frowned at him for a moment, and then suddenly smiled his cheeriest smile. He stood up and clapped the younger man on the shoulder. "No need to worry about that just now. Let's get camp set up for the wounded, all right? Then I'll help you take the pelt."

Cammen nodded, and found us another ferny clearing; ferns colonized every open area here, it seemed. They could be cut and piled up for bedding, so I liked them. Zevran mostly set my tent up for me, because I couldn't do it one-handed and Alistair was busy being incredibly dense about setting up the fire, needing contact advice and guidance from the monosyllabic Cammen. When the young almost-hunter left to attend a 'call of nature,' I asked Alistair what was going on.

"I've seen that look on new fighters before, after their first kill," he told me quietly. "It changes a man, and sometimes the change hurts."

"Where have you seen it?" I wondered. Hadn't all the Gray Wardens been seasoned warriors?

"The mirror." He gave me a grim smile before turning back to Cammen, leading him back to the corpse and keeping up a relentless flow of cheerful talk.

"If all he needed was a pelt, why didn't he just kill something already?" Leliana asked rhetorically. "He's an excellent archer. He could have if he wanted."

"Sending him with us was an insult," Morrigan growled from a dark place beneath some arching tree roots where she'd retreated to examine her wound. "The fool Zathrian refused to give us a real hunter and sent us this quailing boy instead."

"Perhaps he thought Cammen just needed a chance," Leliana suggested. "Now he can become a true hunter."

I watched the boys until they disappeared, then sat with a thump beside Zevran, who was cutting up jerky for dinner. I tried to help but just got in the way, and gave up to just sit and think, and tend to Rocky's scratches.

"Zevran," I said suddenly.

"Hmm?" He paused in his work and looked to me attentively.

"Do you remember your first kill?"

He laughed darkly. "My mother died birthing me. My first victim, as it were. I was a bit too young to remember at the time."

"Zevran, that's horrible!" I exclaimed, putting a hand on his arm. "Don't feel guilty. It wasn't your fault." I was thinking of Leske's pa, and how the man used to hurl insults at the boy, calling him murderer and mother-killer.

Zevran flashed his toothy grin at me. "No, no, it is only a joke. My first kill, you say? It was a straightforward event. Another recruit, jealous at being passed over for a training assignment, tried to get in a bit of extracurricular practice. It did not go quite as he planned."

"Did you feel bad after?"

He looked genuinely surprised. "Feel bad? Why?"

I squirmed, looking down at my hands. "I don't know. Alistair did. Cammen did, and it wasn't even a person."

"Ah," he said, "This is not about me, is it? Come, I told you of my first kill – tell me of yours."

I sighed. "I got caught stealing. I was really little, I think maybe nine, but I had a dagger. The merchant who caught me, he said he was going to turn me over to the guards and they would chop off my right hand. He was holding me by the hair and I was terrified and I just sank my dagger into his belly without thinking. He dropped me and I ran. I found out later he'd died." I paused for a long moment. "And I was glad, because it meant he couldn't hurt me anymore."

"People like us," Zevran said slowly, watching me as though to see if I'd object to the 'us,' "cannot afford the luxury of regret."

I nodded. "That's for damn sure. There's no room for regret in a duster's soul. The past has passed and the future hasn't happened yet; all that matters is the _now_."

"That sounds like a litany," he commented, returning to his cooking.

"Sort of. The short version is _nunc nunc'est_, meaning 'now is now.' We have a lot of sayings but that one's my favorite." I grinned at him. "For example, right now I have a fire and a happy dog and a nice man cooking me dinner, so what have I got to be sad about?"

He threw back his head and laughed. "Nice man? Me? I think you have me confused with someone else."

"That was one tough son of a bitch," Alistair said then, approaching the camp with his arms soaked in blood up to the elbows. Cammen followed, holding the pelt at arm's length. "Took both of us to skin him. Get it? Son of a bitch?"

I chuckled. "Yes, very nice."

We settled down to eat Zevran's food, and afterward Cammen left to hang up the pelt to dry before it spoiled. I nudged Alistair and asked, "Is he okay?"

"I think so. He'll go off and have a good cry after everyone else is in bed, and then he'll feel better," he replied confidently.

And so I waited in my tent that night, staying awake while the others settled down and Leliana got comfortable for her watch, until I heard Cammen slip out through the back of his tent and disappear. I didn't follow right away, merely marked where he'd gone and then waited for twenty minutes. Then I slipped out myself, slinking away from the campfire and in the general direction he'd gone.

I might be able to see in the dark, but that didn't mean I knew where I was going, and my body had taken a lot of convincing before it would let me leave the campfire. I made it by promising myself I wouldn't go so far that I couldn't feel Alistair; as long as I could use his blood as a compass, I could find the camp again. But my heart was beginning to pound and my hands to tremble by the time I heard a quiet voice say, "I know you're there."

I let out a breath I hadn't known I'd been holding, and turned to my left, following the sound until I saw Cammen on a low-hanging branch, slumped against the trunk and kicking his dangling feet listlessly. "Hi," I said, sitting at the tree's roots. "Are you busy?"

"Do I look busy?"

"You might be, I don't know, communing with the forest or something." I grinned at him so he'd know I was joking, and he snorted.

"No, I'm not communing with anything. Just sitting," he said.

"Then can I ask a favor?"

He stiffened slightly, and I could almost hear him thinking _Haven't I done enough?_ But he said, "What do you need?"

"Can you teach me about the forest? Show me how to find my way, and how to hide like you do?"

"Why?"

"I don't want to be afraid anymore," I admitted. I hoped that showing him my weakness would make him feel stronger. "I think, if all this -" I gestured vaguely at the vast forest, "weren't so alien, I would feel better."

He considered this, then dropped lightly out of the tree. "All right."

And thus, by pale moonlight, began my outdoor education. He showed me how to tell which leaves would rustle and which were soft, which plants had thorns and which could be counted on to hide our passage, how to hold my body so I blended into the graceful arcs of bushes and tree trunks, and most importantly, how _not_ to be a hunter. Prey can sense when they are hunted, he told me. Instead, we had to convince the entire forest that we were nothing to fear, and it would accept us and allow us to wear it like a cloak.

This last part I felt I knew well. The ability to convince others that you just weren't worth noticing was the difference between being merely hidden and truly invisible, even in a crowd. Like when the guards demand to know _Who threw that rock_ and you make your whole body say _Not me_.

As I followed in his footsteps and mimicked his movements, the whole experience began to feel... familiar. Cammen moved with confidence and understanding; he traveled through dangerous and hostile land without fear because it was _his _territory. And I remembered the moment, years ago, when the Deep Roads had ceased to be darkspawn lands where I trespassed, and become _my_ Roads, _my_ territory, where one day I would lay waste to the true trespassers.

Cammen stilled and I followed his gaze to a brown shape in the bracken, a rabbit nibbling contentedly at the ferns without a hint of concern. He watched the little rabbit with a sort of loving wonder, his eyes following every soft curve and tiny movement of her paws as she grazed. She paused, then, and looked directly at him, flicked her ears, and started to go back to her food; then she saw me, and fled.

"Sorry," I said. What had I done wrong? Then I knew – I'd wanted to catch her. I'd begun to think about how little jerky we had left and somehow my body must have shown my predatory intent.

Cammen really _hadn't_ wanted to catch her. That's when I realized how he came to surpass the other elves in stalking. He didn't have to pretend to be gentle, because it was true.

"Just a little further, and then we'll go back," he said, and led us onward.

We came to a clearing hemmed by ferns taller than me, and Cammen held back the arching fronds so I could see what lay inside. For a long moment, I stood in silence, struck dumb by sheer breathtaking beauty. The stars had come down to dance.

"What are they?" I whispered when I finally found my voice again.

"Fireflies," he told me, and gave me a shy smile before guiding us back to camp.


	33. The Lady of the Forest

_**Did you come here from Wolf Whistles?** If you want to get up to speed on this story but don't have time to read through all 32 previous chapters, you can visit the Cliff's Notes version at wellspringcd dot com. And welcome! All my readers are well-loved. Especially you._

* * *

"We must be getting close to the den," I said that morning over my bowl of oatmeal. "We should be more careful now."

Cammen nodded. "And there are conflicting tracks. I noticed that last night. We don't want to get on a trail leading _away_ from the den by accident."

And so we decided on moving by stages. Cammen would follow a given trail until he felt confident it was a good one, and then come back for the rest of the group, before scouting ahead again. Cammen thought he could hide well enough to avoid detection, "and I can always climb a tree if I have to," he added with a smile. "Werewolves can't climb."

The day's progress was painfully slow. The forest became steadily wilder, and the trees rustled angrily as we passed. Cammen took frequent detours to avoid nests of spiders and other unnatural predators, and Leliana was overcome with a compulsion to tell creepy legends about the Brecilian Forest's bloody history. When she got to the part about possessed trees that devoured the unwary and a landscape that rearranged itself into mazes to trap travelers, I loudly interrupted her with a request for Zevran to"please in the name of the Stone talk about something else!"

We camped that night in low spirits, fearful of werewolf ambush and wondering how much longer we'd be wandering, and how many elves died every day as we fumbled around out here. It was my turn for first watch and I sat under my blanket as the others went through their bedtime rituals. Alistair normally took longest because he always checked each piece of armor as he removed it, before hanging it up carefully on any available tree branch. Tonight, though, he stopped halfway through, pushing up his sleeve to examine his right forearm with a frown.

"What's wrong?" I asked, keeping my voice down because everyone else was already in bed.

"Well... I got kind of a scratch, here, during the fight with the werewolves," he said, and came over to sit beside me. "I didn't think it was a big deal, but look – it's all red and puffy, and my wrist and elbow are sore."

A small puncture where a wolf's tooth had penetrated between bracer and gauntlet had turned an impressive range of rainbow colors, red inflammation spreading out from purplish bruising from the blunt force of the wolf's bite. I touched the spreading redness lightly and felt the fever heat of infection.

"This needs elfroot," I told him. He nodded glumly, and I dug the crock of ointment out of his pack and knelt back beside him, pulling his arm into my lap. I wasn't sure how best to use it, so I settled for spreading a thin layer over the whole discolored area.

"That's really depressing," he groused as I worked. "Morrigan practically gets her arm chewed off and she's fine, but here I am with this tiny boo-boo and I get an infection. Some fearsome warrior I am."

"Animal bites are dangerous, it doesn't make you any less manly and impressive," I said, smoothing my palm along his forearm and over his wrist to rub off the last of the ointment on my hand.

"Manly and impressive, am I? That's new." He grinned at me, clearly expecting me to make some sort of joke.

"No, I... I mean it." My heart beat hard in my chest as I slid my hand down and laced my fingers through his.

His eyes softened and he closed his hand over mine. Then he winced and let go again. "Ow."

"You should go to bed and let that elfroot do its thing." I released his hand before I hurt him any more, and he gave me a wry smile and crawled into his pup tent, leaving me to my watch.

The firelight flickered on the surly trees, their branches leaning away from the hated fire. They were super spooky but didn't seem openly hostile... yet. I listened to the others shuffle around in their blankets and get comfortable, falling asleep one by one, except for Zevran.

I'd had enough time to get bored before the whisper of canvas caught my attention and I looked over to see him standing up outside his tent. He gave me an easy smile, sauntered over and lounged on the ground beside me, propped up on one elbow.

"Can't sleep?" I asked him, raising one eyebrow.

"It's this forest," he said with a shrug. "I have to admit, I share some of your discomfort with it. I may be an elf, but I am a city elf, and a forest like this is so very uncivilized and dirty."

"Stone's mercy, _yes_," I shuddered. "Dirt is so gross. Look at my trousers! These used to be red!"

He pursed his lips, shaking his head in disapproval. "Such clothing is beneath you. Truly, you are wasted on this barbarian land."

"Oh, I suppose I should wear finest silks and lace?" I scoffed. "And high heels and petticoats, so I have to mince about like a helpless plaything? No, thank you."

"Not at all," he chuckled. "I see a vision in black leather, all deadly grace and sexy menace, and just a hint of cleavage."

I laid a hand on my brow, feigning a swoon. "Zevran, you quite turn a girl's head! My heart, it is all aflutter with your wiles. Truly no man has ever worshiped me so."

"I know." He looked up at me then, his eyes intense and serious. "It is a crime, how he strings you along, when others would give you what you deserve."

I blinked, then sputtered, "No, it's not like that at all!"

He averted his gaze, watching the fire now, its light setting his blond hair aglow like spun gold. "As you say. I can only speak of what I see."

I frowned at him, confused. I sort of knew what he meant, but seriously doubted he felt _that way_ about me. I'd taken all his flirting in stride because he seemed to flirt with everyone, even Alistair occasionally, much to my amusement and Alistair's consternation. I'd never thought he meant anything by it. And I didn't think he really meant it now, either.

"Zev," I said quietly. He tilted his head a bit towards me, listening. "I'm not going to send you away. You can stay with us as long as you want. You don't have to suck up to me all the time."

He sat up at once and turned to me, his eyes were tight and he bit his lip, and for a horrible moment I thought I'd misunderstood and hurt him. But then his mask slipped back into place and he smiled smoothly. "_Carina_, to say I 'suck up' implies I do not speak the truth."

"Flatterer," I laughed a little, really hoping he was as relaxed as he looked. "I meant what I said, though. You don't have to worry. I'm happy to have you."

"And here I am, happy to be had," he laughed, too. "Dirt and werewolves notwithstanding. I shall leave you to your watch, and attempt once more to capture that elusive fairy, Sleep."

* * *

We resumed our painstaking progress in the morning. Occasionally Zevran or Leliana would scout beside Cammen, which I would have liked to do myself, but Alistair had had trouble waking up for his watch and was still bleary-eyed and quiet. The elfroot had healed the wound and the bruising, but his joints stayed sore and hot to the touch. I didn't want to leave him alone.

Except that after a few hours, Zevran came darting out of the bushes and beckoned urgently for me to follow. "Cammen wishes you to see something, come quickly," he murmured, melting back into the trees. I gestured for Morrigan, Rocky and Leliana to stay with Alistair, and followed.

Zevran was learning quickly, but barely any more familiar with forest stealth than I, so I didn't have to work hard to keep up, though I winced at the occasional rustle of dead leaves or scrape of a thorn on leather. We came to a sort of hillock overlooking a place where a glacier had carved a deep valley long ago, finding Cammen lying on his belly under some more of the verdant ferns and peering over the edge intently. He nodded at us when we arrived and pointed down at the valley.

The forest's composition changed slightly in the thinner soil – I felt a thrill of hope that, if we climbed down there, I'd connect to the Stone again – and we could see almost all the way across as tall, branchless trees reached towards the distant sun. Game trails and the territory boundary paths showed that the valley belonged to the werewolves and was heavily hunted.

A flicker of gray caught my eye and I observed as a trio of werewolves emerged from the distance, following a trail with their noses to the ground, casting back and forth like Rocky did when he couldn't find the scent. The three of us watched for some time as the pack continued its fruitless search and eventually disappeared again.

"They've been doing that all morning," Cammen breathed into my ear. "They hunt, but not for us, nor for ordinary game."

"Then for what?"

"I don't know. It worries me. The whole pack is out here. Passing through will be... challenging." He sounded calm, but his pale face and tight grip on his dagger told me how frightened he was.

"Let's talk to the others," I decided, and we slithered backwards until we could stand up without being seen and began to retrace our steps.

But we'd crept barely halfway back when a snuffling sound made us all freeze where we stood. The snuffling turned into an excited sneeze, and paws began trotting towards us from where we'd just been hiding.

"Run," Cammen cried, and bolted.

"We can't outrun wolves," I yelled at him angrily. I grabbed Zevran's wrist and dragged him after me as I chased Cammen anyway, though, because I'd be damned if I'd let the boy commit suicide alone. Behind us, the werwolf howled his dreadful hunting song, echoed by throat after throat across the valley as the entire pack heard his call.

Running paws gained on us rapidly and then a second hunting unit began to converge on us from the left. Cammen flinched away from it, stumbling in his haste to change course. "Climb!" Zevran roared at him, and the younger elf leaped almost gratefully up the nearest tree, shinning up the trunk as easily as climbing a ladder.

Zevran sheathed his daggers and started to follow; I skidded to a stop and turned around to face the wolves, shouting, "I can't climb that! My arms are too short! Zev-"

Then I was too busy to talk. The first werewolf, the one who'd scented us, leaped snarling at my throat and I ducked around the tree. He missed me and hit the tree, teeth and claws tearing out strips of bark. I sank both daggers in his ribs but missed his heart, taking a kick to the chest from a hind paw that would have knocked me flat if I hadn't managed to turn the fall into a roll and spring back on my feet. Zev dropped out of the tree and landed on the beast as it tried to pursue, driving a dagger into its spine.

A second wolf arrived, and a third, and a fourth, ranging themselves around us to block our escape and trying to keep some semblance of control over their strategy, though their eyes blazed with sheer fury and blood-lust. The closest wolf broke first and lunged, and Cammen took it with a bladed arrow in the eye. The remaining two wolves bellowed with rage and attacked, one scrabbling frantically at the tree in an attempt to claw his way up to the archer by sheer strength, the other aiming for Zevran as the closest target.

Zevran danced out of the way of its leap, but it lashed out with a clawed paw and caught him, jerking him off his feet as it flew past, and the two rolled in a tangle on the ground. I threw myself on the tangle of bodies and tackled the wolf, giving Zevran a second's distraction to jerk himself out of the grasping claws as the beast twisted to free itself from the new threat. He stabbed his short Crow dagger into its neck and hot blood gushed over us both from the wound. The beast thrashed violently, throwing me off its back and tearing great gashes across Zevran's thigh as it panicked.

We jumped away to let it bleed out its life in peace, and turned in time to see Cammen and his werewolf crash to the ground as the branch he'd perched on proved too weak to support the massive beast. The werewolf landed badly, its oddly-proportioned hind legs failing to support its weight, and Cammen scrambled away from it, Zevran grabbing the creature by the scruff as it tried to follow and cutting its throat with surgical precision.

A second round of howls rose from all around us as more hunting pairs caught the intoxicating scent of blood, dozens of voices now. Cammen nocked another arrow and gave me a look sick with fear, pleading with his eyes for me to _do_ something, but all I could think of was how my blood and bones would join this forest instead of my Stone.

Then the crashing of some huge beast came from our left, something far larger than a werewolf, and I laughed hysterically as a wolf as big as a house shot towards us, forest parting before it like waves. Giant wolves! Of course! Normal wolves just weren't bad enough!

An instant before the animal caught me up in its mouth, I realized its fur was pure, glistening white. Then it tossed me into the air to land on its back, where I clung to the fur for lack of anything better to do. The animal snatched both elves in its huge mouth, threw them up beside me and ran, loping gracefully through the forest as trees bowed out of its way. Behind us came the disappointed whines of the werewolves as they watched a greater predator carry away their prey.

"Well, it beats walking," I said to Zevran, grinning maniacally because hey, why not? It's better than crying.

He grinned back. "A day with you is never dull, I'll give you that," he shouted over the crashing and creaking of the forest as it gave way, graceful and respectful, like courtiers before a Queen. Cammen just hung on for dear life, looking like he might throw up at any moment.

And after only a few more seconds, the great white wolf trotted to a halt and lay down, placing its sleek head on the ground so we could slide off. Before it, Alistair and the others crouched with drawn weapons, somewhat nonplussed by the sudden appearance of an impossibly large and seemingly peaceful wolf. Rocky fell to the ground and groveled, exposing his throat and belly to the white wolf, who whuffed in an affectionate, almost-human laugh.

"It's not my blood, I'm fine," I assured Alistair, who had blanched when he saw me, drenched in werewolf blood as I was. "Zevran had my back. He's got some scratches but he's okay, too. I think Cammen is fine. Cammen, you all right?" The young hunter nodded, leaning on his bow and breathing long, steadying breaths.

Then, to our collective astonishment, the wolf shimmered and blurred, and an instant later, a nude woman stood in its place. Her form was willowy, her face achingly beautiful, but her body seemed composed of as much vegetation as flesh. Green vines showed through her pale skin instead of veins, and her arms and legs ended in bark-covered branches shaped like hands and feet but tipped with thorns.

"Greetings," she intoned in a voice like the sighing of wind and the swishing of leaves. "I am the Lady of the Forest, and I have need of you."

"What can we do for you, Lady?" I asked after an instant of confusion. I dropped to my knees and bowed my head respectfully, showing her my neck as I took my cue from Rocky, who fawned at her feet. Beside me, Alistair went down on one knee as well, and slowly, the others followed suit.

"I need your hands," she said softly, holding out her own woody claws. "I have none, nor do my children."

"May I assume you don't intend to literally cut them off or anything?" I asked dubiously.

She laughed, and her laughter was as birds greeting the dawn. "I mean you no harm. We need you, my children and I. Shall we go? I will explain on the way, and we have no time to waste."

I glanced at Alistair for his opinion, but he just shrugged. I frowned at him for a moment, noting his pallor and dull eyes, but the Lady shifted her feet impatiently and I turned back to her with a nod. "As you wish."

"Everyone join hands," she ordered, and took one of mine. I winced as the thorns dug into my skin, and Alistair jerked my hand free and thrust his own gauntleted hand into hers. The rest of us joined hands in a circle, all but Rocky, who lay adoringly on her toes like a rug.

"Let us go," the Lady said solemnly, and my stomach lurched as we abruptly sank into the ground. Morrigan gasped in near-panic as the earth closed over our heads, tree roots groaning as they bent together again, but a fey glow emanated from the Lady of the Forest and we were not in total blackness.

Then there was a sensation of dizzying speed, and the roots that formed the walls and ceiling of our underground chamber whipped about wildly as we were propelled through the earth. We swayed, struggling to keep our balance, and Alistair leaned heavily on me for a moment before the motion smoothed out and we were whispering along in perfect peace.

"Now then," the Lady said as though nothing remarkable was happening. "The werewolves and I, we share a kinship. The precise nature of this kinship I shall explain when the time is right, but for now, know that I love them, and they me.

"But my wolves struggle with their bestial nature, and my beloved Sundancer pays the price. She is in whelp, alone and afraid because she fled from her pack lest they lose control and devour her pups." The Lady's eyes darkened, and the vines under her skin seemed to ripple with some powerful emotion. "I wish I could say she need not fear, that between myself and her mate Swiftrunner, we could protect her pups, but some of the younger wolves, they lack... control. Her blood and the smell of her fear might be too much for them to bear."

"Is this not normal?" I asked, trying not to laugh at using the word 'normal' for any of this. "I mean, what do other werewolf mothers do?"

"They flee," she said simply. "They act on instinct and hide with their pups. But Sundancer's whelping has stalled. Something is wrong and..." She held out her thorned hands ruefully. "These hands are not made for midwifery. Breeding females are so rare, and their pups so precious... To lose her would break the heart of the pack."

"All righty," I said, grinning. "Let's deliver a litter of werewolf puppies. That will round out the day nicely."

* * *

_Sundancer and her pack have their own thrilling story of violence, the search for self, loyalty, betrayal, and love, which I'll start posting as soon as I have written enough buffer (and have really settled on a "voice" for it). Look for it probably this weekend? I'll let you know :D_

_Glorious, whipped-cream-with-cherries gratitude for everyone who has read this story so far, and especially anyone who's posted reviews, and extra-especially mille libri who, as I've mentioned, kept me well reined-in this time._


	34. The Nature of the Beast

_Special thanks to mille libri for sharing the benefit of her life experience!_

* * *

"Let's deliver a litter of werewolf puppies. That will round out the day nicely," I said, grinning.

"You seriously intend to do this – this _creature's_ bidding?" Morrigan demanded incredulously, but her white-knuckled grip on my hand told me that most of her distress had to do with being trapped underground.

I smiled at her reassuringly. _I_ didn't mind being underground at _all_. "It'll be all right. We're here looking for werewolves, after all, and I'm getting the impression that they aren't the mindless beasts Zathrian thinks they are. Maybe Sundancer and her mate will help us."

Our movement slowed gradually, and then the earth opened above our heads as we rose to the surface in the middle of a bramble. Sundancer had dug a den here, the pile of soft dirt mounded up beside a large depression in the ground about three feet deep and six feet wide. Sundancer herself, golden-furred and sleek despite her swollen abdomen, whimpered in fright at the arrival of strangers, and the Lady of the Forest ran to her, jumping into the hole and cradling her surprisingly feminine head in her lap. Sundancer lay panting on her side, her heavy breasts plain to see, all _four_ of them.

"Wow," I said, staring blankly at the laboring werewolf. "Does anyone know how to deliver werewolf puppies?"

"They are born in the manner of wolves and dogs," the Lady said helpfully.

"Um," Cammen said hesitantly. "I helped the herdmistress last foaling, and I watched a wolf mother have her pups a few months ago. Do you think...?"

"That's more experience than any of us have," I told him, after looking around at everyone else's helpless expressions. Anyone who could actually watch a wolf mother give birth without either frightening her or getting grossed out was definitely more qualified than any of us.

Cammen bit his lip, his face a strange mixture of fear (either of making a mistake or of being bitten, possibly both) and eagerness to help. "Is it – is it safe for me to -" He gestured towards Sundancer's loins. When the Lady nodded, he crossed to the den and knelt beside her, giving her his hand to sniff before he touched her.

"Morrigan, what have you got for us in that herb bag?" I asked her, interrupting her appalled contemplation of the roughened ground where we had just emerged. She shook herself and started digging through her many tiny jars and leather pouches.

Sundancer whined, arching her back and screwing up her eyes in pain as a contraction wracked her body. Then she snarled and tried to snap at Cammen as he probed for the pup. The Lady restrained her, stroking her fur and calming her, and I was impressed that the young hunter didn't flinch. I sat at the edge of the hole near Cammen, who now had his hand buried up to the wrist in the poor girl.

"Can you tell what's wrong?" I asked quietly.

He nodded, his brow furrowed in concentration. "The puppy is upside-down. If she were halla, that would be a disaster, but I think... If I can just turn it around..."

Sundancer cried out in pain as he worked, pressing her face into the Lady's belly and sobbing as her body trembled with exhaustion and her 'midwife' muttered apologies. I wondered how long she'd been in labor already. Too long, that much was obvious.

Cammen braced a knee under her hips to bring her to all fours and use gravity to her advantage. When her next contraction rippled through her poor tired body, Cammen pulled gently on the pup, murmuring encouragingly to her in elvish until the contraction was over.

"One more, _lethallan_," he told her. "One more and your children will be free."

They waited awkwardly, crammed into the hole, for another contraction. Sundancer's eyes looked glazed and she panted, her tongue lolling out. I gestured for Leliana, who sat by in rapt excitement, to give her a little water. The two men were hanging around feeling useless and uncomfortable at the far side of the clearing. Leliana poured water from her flask into the Lady's palm, where Sundancer lapped listlessly at it.

"Not that, give her this," Morrigan said then, appearing at the edge of the hole and holding out something sharp-smelling and dark in a small bottle. "It will strengthen the contractions. I think."

"You think?" I repeated sharply.

"I think. It won't hurt her, anyway. And I doubt she will deliver her pups alive in her current state."

I sighed and nodded for Leliana to give it to her to drink. Sundancer refused it at first, but the Lady whispered to her and convinced her to lap up the herbal tincture.

She had almost finished when she let out a moan, stiffening with a fresh contraction, and Cammen responded immediately, slipping the pup free in cooperation with her muscles. It fell limply into his other hand, its protective birthing sac torn, and opened its mouth to gasp for air after having been stuck for so long. Sundancer seized the pup in her mouth, and I cried out in panic, sure she would hurt him with her great teeth. She glared at me for my rude interruption, and licked and rubbed the puppy until she had cleared his lungs and drew a weak cry from the tiny throat. Then she lay down with a tired sigh and laid the pup at her breast, where it began to nurse with surprising vigor.

"How many will she have?" I asked the Lady, feeling embarrassed for forgetting Sundancer wasn't just an animal.

"Usually three or four in total," she replied, looking helpless. "I am sorry, I wish I could do more. I wish I could give her strength."

But we needn't have worried, it turned out. The next pup came barely ten minutes later, born all at once in a single strong, smooth contraction and sliding into Cammen's waiting hands. Sundancer made no move to take it, panting with the aftershock of the birth, so he tore off the birthing sac and massaged the tiny body himself, rubbing it vigorously until it cried, sounding surprisingly like a kitten.

Sundancer surged up when she heard it, grabbing the pup, placing him on the ground beside her and cradling him to her breast. The pup, for all the world like a normal dog except for its oddly-shaped hips and shoulders, searched eagerly for a nipple and began to suckle, uttering little excited mews in between swallows.

"Wow," I said again as I watched the growing family. Cammen was watching, too, with that same look of loving wonder I'd seen on him before when we found the rabbit. He went to his pack, then, and came back with his soft sleeping tunic, which he began to use to dry the puppies' wet fur. Sundancer growled a bit at first, but when she saw he wasn't going to take away her babies, she relaxed for a well-earned rest before her next birthing.

Maybe a half hour went by before her next pup was ready to be born. We gave her sips of water and bites of biscuit to keep her strength up. When the puppy came it was almost a surprise, so strong and quick was her contraction, and Cammen barely caught it before it fell on the dirt floor.

Sundancer again didn't try to take the puppy, her body shaking with the effort of the birth, and I worried Morrigan's herb might have demanded too much from her. Cammen took care of it again, cleaning and rubbing the puppy until it bawled lustily. He started to put the pup to breast, but paused for a moment when it began to suck on one of his fingers. He smiled as it curled its paws around the finger and let out urgent squeaks and slurping sounds, and tenderly stroked its glossy fur once, before placing it beside its mother.

When Sundancer felt the pup's nuzzling, she woke up somewhat from her daze and curled herself protectively around her babies with a deep sigh. We waited, but her eyelids began to droop and she seemed to fall asleep.

"Is that it, then? Just three?" I asked the Lady.

"It would appear so," she nodded. Cammen sat on the edge of the hole and wiped his hands on his shirt, watching the family with unmistakable pride.

"That was amazing!" Leliana exploded in an ecstasy of bardic glee. I could almost see the ballad being written in her head. I shushed her and she pressed her hands over her mouth, smiling at me with delight.

"Good job, Cammen," Alistair said, patting the younger man on the shoulder. He'd gotten out of his armor while we waited, apparently deciding we weren't going to be fighting any werewolves with the Lady here, and smiled despite the tired eyes and slumped shoulders that told me he felt worse, not better.

I stayed and looked at the plump, furry babies for a long moment, vaguely trying to understand the powerful emotions they stirred. I wished I could hold one. I wished one was _my _baby.

Suddenly confused, I jumped up and retreated, pulled my blanket from my pack and draped it over the exhausted mother before beginning to set up camp. The sun had begun to pass below the treeline, and I didn't want to leave the new mother or make Alistair travel in his condition. The others joined me, and we were about to start dinner when the Lady of the Forest suddenly stood up.

"I must go," she said shortly. "I must speak with Swiftrunner. He needs to know his mate is safe, before he does something... rash."

"And leave her here? Is it safe?" Safe for us to be near her, I meant, and she smiled slightly in acknowledgment of the silent question.

"Yes. She knows your scents now." And with that, she leaped into the air, bursting into her wolf shape as she flew and landing at a full gallop. Within seconds, she was gone.

Dubiously, I scratched my head in the abrupt silence for a moment before finally saying, "I guess we'd best keep watch in pairs tonight. It's all well and good for her to say Sundancer is safe, but I don't fancy being a midnight snack if she's wrong."

Zevran, Leliana, Cammen, Morrigan and I worked out our preferred watch shifts, but at some point during the camp setup Alistair had gone off somewhere. Eventually I followed the swish and crash of dying shrubbery to find him practicing backhand swings against the local flora.

"So do you want first watch?" I asked, noting how his hair was stuck down over his sweaty neck. He really shouldn't be out here exercising. Maybe I should excuse him from watch tonight?

"Okay," he grunted, beheading a fern.

"So tonight's schedule is you and me first, then Cammen and Morrigan, then Leliana and Zevran," I said. "Are you coming back for dinner?"

He lopped off a sapling at chest height, then stood breathing hard for a moment before replying. "You should swap with Leliana."

"What? Why?"

"Don't you prefer the morning shift?" he asked, hefting his sword again and switching to overhead swings, chopping off a low-hanging branch.

"Usually, but you hate getting up early," I explained, wondering where this was going.

"Yes, so, switch with Leliana."

"But I want to watch with you." I frowned as he viciously murdered a bramble. "What's the problem?"

"Nothing. I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You've been acting sick all day-"

"I'm not sick." He stopped and stood panting with his back to me, sword hanging at his side. "I heard you talking to Zevran last night. And then today _he_ was with you, not me, when the wolves came. You came back covered in blood! You needed me, and I wasn't there. Zevran was."

I wished he would turn around, so I could see his face. Slowly I said, "I wasn't hurt. Are you... Are you mad at me? Why?"

"How could I be mad at you?" He raised his sword again. His arm shook and he dropped it again, shoulders drooping. "He's good with you. You're good together. I'm... a clumsy 'overgrown lout.'"

I couldn't believe I was hearing this. He must have a fever, or been hit on the head. "I don't want Zevran. I want you. Please can I watch with you tonight?"

"No!" He whirled to face me, unconsciously dropping into his fighting stance, and his eyes blazed so wildly that I flinched and backed away from him. He must have seen my fear, then, because he turned away again, his face twisting with anger and pain and self-loathing.

Shocked and bewildered, I clenched my fists to stop them shaking and whispered, "Alistair?" I didn't ask if he was okay, because he obviously wasn't.

"I'm sorry." He drew a deep, shuddering breath. "I don't – I'm sorry. Please can I... have a moment. I'll follow you in a minute."

I hesitated. He shouldn't be alone out here in this condition, but... I felt the old fear stir in my stomach when I thought of his fury, and I seized the excuse to get away. I plodded slowly back to camp, ashamed of the cowardice that made me go.

"Where's your knight in shining armor?" Zevran asked lazily from where he leaned on his pack, a bowl of stew steaming in his lap. Then he saw my face and sat up. "What is it?"

"He's not himself," I muttered, and sneered at myself for making excuses for him. I flopped onto the ground beside Rocky and took the bowl of stew Leliana handed to me, blowing on it until it cooled enough to eat.

He still hadn't come back, though, by the time the others began to settle into their tents. We'd fed Sundancer bites of meat and sips of water, but she became agitated when we intruded into her nest, so we mostly left her alone. Cammen set up his tent beside her and propped the flap open so he could check on her easily. She seemed to mind his presence less, and even let him help her once when a puppy was having trouble latching on and she couldn't maneuver the tiny mouth effectively with her clawed hands.

I was huddled with Rocky beside the campfire, stroking his fur and watching the puppies dream, when Alistair finally returned to camp. He dragged his feet, head and hands drooping, and ignored my offer of stew, dropping heavily to hands and knees before crawling into his tent and collapsing on his bedroll.

"Can I come in and bring you dinner?" I called softly through the tent flap.

"No," he growled. "I'm not hungry. Leave me alone." So I did, scrambling away before I made him angry again.

"What ails your other half?" Morrigan asked quietly as she came to retrieve her teapot from the fire before bed.

"He had an infection from a cut on his arm," I explained worriedly. "We put elfroot on it, but he's acting worse by the hour. I don't know what to do."

"A cut? From what?"

"The werewolf fight day before yesterday. Can you do anything for him?"

She gripped my arm and asked urgently, "Was he bitten?"

I stared at her in horror. "You don't think – But it was just a little cut!"

"You think that makes a difference to a magical curse?" she snarled. "Why did you not tell me before? He puts us all in danger!"

"No," I insisted stubbornly, "We don't know that. It's just a normal infection, and he'll be fine after he sleeps. We don't even know it was a bite. It might have been his own armor dug into his skin."

"Suit yourself," she snapped, picking up her pot and stalking angrily into the darkness. "But do not expect me to protect you from him."

* * *

The Lady of the Forest returned early the following morning, and running smoothly beside her was a massive brown werewolf, battle-scarred and heavily muscled. Everyone but Leliana and Zevran were still in our tents, but I heard the crashing brush and scrambled out in my nightclothes to see what happened.

The new werewolf dashed across the campsite without sparing any of us a glance, and leapt into the rough nest where Sundancer lay curled around her tiny pups. Zevran drew his daggers and jumped toward him, shouting in alarm, but the Lady caught his arm.

The big werewolf gathered Sundancer into his arms, rocking her, breathing great lungfuls of her scent between soft, keening whines of relief. Sundancer appeared frozen in terror, and her eyes sought the Lady's; when her Lady nodded and smiled to let her know all was well, the female werewolf relaxed against her mate and licked at his muzzle.

"You should not have run from me," the new wolf said in a deep, rough voice, the words oddly distorted coming from the wolfish muzzle but still understandable. He must be Swiftrunner, I thought, and my eyes widened in surprise to hear him speak.

"I was afraid," Sundancer admitted, laying her ears flat in apology. Then she wagged her tail, thumping the soft earth of her den, and asked shyly, "Would you like to meet your sons?"

Everyone was out of their tents, now, and I gestured for them to go away into the forest so the little family could enjoy their reunion in privacy. I waited for Alistair, intending to ask how he felt, but he answered my question for me when he tripped over a tree root, fell on all fours and vomited bile. I gasped and knelt beside him, pulling his arm around my shoulders before he collapsed – he burned with fever and his tunic was soaked with sweat.

_Sweating, nausea, fever, unpredictable temper... Stone have mercy on us_, I thought as I struggled to open the top on my water flask one-handed.

"I'm – fine," he managed, coughing and wiping his mouth on his sleeve. "I just need a moment."

"I am sorry." The sound of whispering trees came from behind us, and I looked up to see the Lady of the Forest watching us, her black eyes sad.

"He's going to be fine, there's nothing to be sorry about," I snapped angrily. Everyone was so willing to write him off as dead already -

"There is," she said calmly. "The time has come for me to explain."

"This should be good," I muttered. The others gathered around curiously. I occupied myself trying to get Alistair to drink some water without choking on it.

"You have come for Witherfang, to use his heart to destroy the curse on Zathrian's people," she began, ignoring Zevran's sharp, questioning look. "But he has not told you the whole truth."

"How do you know?" Zevran asked in a deceptively silky tone.

"Because there are things he would not tell anyone," she replied, unruffled. "Centuries ago, Zathrian's son was betrayed and murdered by humans, his daughter raped, and she killed herself when she found she was with child. Driven nearly mad with grief, Zathrian bound a forest spirit to the body of a great white wolf known as Witherfang, and so created the curse that afflicts this forest to punish those humans who had destroyed what he held most dear. Beautiful and terrible, human and beast."

"And now his own people pay for his lost temper," Zevran said in bitter amusement. "How trite."

"We tried to contact him, to beg him for mercy," the Lady said with her first hint of anger. "Every time the landships passed. But he refused us, and -"

"Now he cannot refuse us any longer," came Swiftrunner's fierce growl. "We spread the curse to his own people so he must lift it, or they die."

He and his mate had come out of the den to crouch by the Lady's feet, cuddling their sleeping pups. Sundancer laid her muzzle on her mate's broad shoulder; she looked almost delicate beside him.

Alistair had managed to hold down most of the water. I let him settle back to lean on a tree trunk and watch the proceedings with bleary eyes, and said with a frown, "I assume _you_ are Witherfang? You're certainly a 'great white wolf.'"

She laughed her inhuman laugh and said, "I am the Lady of the Forest. But if you bring Zathrian to me, I can force Witherfang to appear, and we can end the curse."

"But if you refuse-" Swiftrunner cut in sharply. The Lady stroked his heavy head with one hand, and he quieted.

"If you refuse, I can ensure that you never find him," she finished, her eyes like flint.

I shook my head. "We don't have time to run back and forth in this forest. The elves are sick, and..." I didn't want to say what was wrong with Alistair. It felt like saying it out loud would make it too true.

"I will carry you to him," she suggested.

"Fine," I decided.

Cammen jumped to his feet. "We cannot lead her back to the camp! What if her werewolves attack again? What if they kill Zathrian?"

Swiftrunner's eyes gleamed a feral yellow, and he bared his teeth in a horrible grin at the appetizing thought, but the Lady silenced him with a look before answering Cammen. "We wish only to end the curse that afflicts your people and mine. This I swear."

"Swiftrunner," he appealed to the wolf then, "Your mate owes us – owes _me_ – her life, and the lives of your children. Will you give me your word that you will not harm my Keeper?"

He growled, a low rumble in his chest, obviously torn. "I will protect my pack," he said finally. "I must defend them if Zathrian attacks. But... I will not strike first. You have my word."

"Everyone happy?" I said shortly, standing up myself. "Then let's go, _now_. Pack up."

Swiftrunner left while we were packing, dashing into the forest to return a half-hour later with a dark gray werewolf beside him. The newcomer crouched in respectful submission before the Lady of the Forest. "Gatekeeper is trusted," Swiftrunner told everyone. "He will guard my Sundancer while we go."

"I am strong enough now," she insisted, but obeyed his stern command to stay in her hole. I frowned, noting that werewolf sexual equality had a long way to go.

"What are you doing in your armor?" I scolded Alistair then, when he came out of his tent with his stuff packed. "You're not fighting anyone in your condition."

"I'll fight if I have to," he said roughly, jerking up his tent pegs and stuffing the canvas into his bag.

"Shall we go?" the Lady asked us all, and burst into her great white wolf without waiting for a reply. The thicket folded away from her like a blanket, and she lay down in the open space, resting her chin on the ground for us to climb up. Leliana squealed with girlish excitement and scrambled nimbly to her back; I started to follow, straining to reach up without pulling too hard on her fur. Damned short legs.

"Allow me," Zevran offered, boosting me up with his hands on my waist.

"Don't _touch_ -" Alistair snarled, his hand going to his sword, then controlled himself with monumental effort, closing his eyes. "Please. Don't touch her."

The great wolf suddenly lifted her head and whined at something off to our left. She shook slightly and Leliana and I slid down quickly before we fell; then she reformed into the alien woman with a cry of "Zathrian comes! He's here!"

"Hello, Witherfang," came that smooth and gentle voice, but it bore a reverberation of power that rolled off the commanding figure that strode into the clearing. "It has been some time."

Sundancer yelped in terror, and her pups wailed at being woken up. Swiftrunner shuddered at the sound, his eyes blazed, and with a roar, he attacked.


	35. Keeper's Curse

Swiftrunner leaped at Zathrian, teeth bared and claws extended, but the Keeper was ready – the power I'd sensed in him blazed forth, and the werewolf alpha smashed into an invisible wall and collapsed to the ground, blood pouring from his nose. Gatekeeper had moved his body between Zathrian and Sundancer, and he snarled viciously but stayed where he was, afraid to draw Zathrian's wrath against the vulnerable pups. Swiftrunner began to gather himself to spring; Zathrian raised his glowing staff.

"Stop it! Swiftrunner, you gave your word," Cammen cried, running between them and waving his arms to attract the raging wolf's attention. "You promised! He hasn't done anything!"

"You see how quickly they betray," Zathrian shouted at us all. "Beasts have no honor! They only wish to kill and destroy."

"Enough," the Lady of the Forest spoke then, her soft, sighing voice cutting through the chaos at once. The pups ceased wailing, and Swiftrunner shuddered and fell to his knees when she touched him. Gatekeeper's growl subsided, and he looked relieved but watchful.

"I knew you were Witherfang," I snapped at her. "You lied!"

"She cannot be trusted," Zathrian seized on the discord. "Her only desire is to survive, as with all living things."

"I thought they wished to kill and destroy, _mage_," I said coldly. "And you have hardly been forthright, yourself, sneaking along behind us to see if we did your dirty work. She says you created the curse. Did you?"

The Keeper's lip twisted in contempt, but he forced himself to calm and answered me levelly. "Yes. You do not know what they _did_. To my son, my daughter. They _deserved_ it."

"But they're long dead," I argued. "You're only punishing your own people now. And the werewolves aren't beasts. Look, they talk! Swiftrunner, say something."

He tried, but the words came out garbled from his rapidly-swelling muzzle, and Zathrian sneered at him, opening his mouth to contradict me when Sundancer piped up in her softer voice. "We can speak. We were as beasts once, but we found the Lady, and she has given us our minds again, though we still struggle."

Zathrian stared in horror at the nest and its contents, causing Gatekeeper's hackles to rise. "They are _breeding_ now? That is an abomination! They were never meant to breed!"

"Centuries have passed, Zathrian, and all creatures grow and adapt," the Lady said calmly. "All creatures except you, it seems, steeped in your rage... and your own fear of death. Your people think you have found the secret of their immortality, but the truth is that the curse itself sustains your unnatural existence. Ah, young hunter, you see now the depth of his cowardice?"

Cammen had gone deathly pale, and he turned slowly to stare at his Keeper, eyes wide with shock. He trembled violently and took a step away from the man he and his clan had believed their savior.

Zathrian's face fell, and for the first time he seemed unsure of himself. "I – no! Cammen, I swear, I care only for you and our people!"

"Then remove the curse," Cammen said in a flat, stunned voice. "If you care for us. Save us."

"I will!" Keeper Zathrian roared, pointing his staff at the Lady furiously. "Help me kill Witherfang and wipe out these creatures for our clan!"

"What? No -" Cammen began in dismay, when the thorny brambles around us suddenly whipped into life, lashing like an angry cat's tail and slapping themselves around the Lady and her wolves.

"Zathrian you bastard, stop!" I shouted and made to dash at him, drawing my daggers.

He turned his mad eyes on me and flicked a hand in our direction with a crazed scream of, "Defend them and you die, too, shem!"

The brambles snapped into place around my arms and legs, lifting me off the ground as trees strode in like soldiers and reached down with their mighty limbs to seize us; I could hear the cries and struggles of my comrades but couldn't turn my head to look.

I could see Cammen, though, standing horrified in the center of the clearing as Swiftrunner and Gatekeeper thrashed uselessly against their bonds, blood beginning to rain to the soft earth as they tore their flesh against the thorns. Sundancer had curled her body into a tight ball around her wailing babies, and she howled in pain when Zathrian battered her with branches and roots and shouted incoherently about breeding monstrosities.

Then I heard a new bellow of rage and strained to see that Alistair had torn his sword free by sheer brute strength. He slashed at the brambles, ripping through them in great scything sweeps, and staggered away from their creeping grasp. Zathrian raised his staff, screaming an incantation, and Alistair set himself, dropped his sword and shaped his hands into a sort of semicircle in front of his chest, then thrust them out at the mage at the same instant as Zathrian released his spell.

The magical force rebounded on him and the sizzling blue liquid magic sprayed out in all directions, hissing where it struck leaves and fur and soaking his robes. He stumbled and fell on his back, his face suddenly blank and stunned, and instantly the trees and brambles released us and we all tumbled unceremoniously to the ground, the werewolves collapsing into trembling, painful heaps.

I thought the battle was over and started to ask the Lady what to do now, but Alistair snatched up his sword in both hands and rushed at the stricken mage, roaring in blind fury. Zathrian recovered enough of his wits to roll desperately away from the first thrust, the sword sinking deeply into the soil, and Alistair threw his weight back, trying to yank the blade out of the ground before his quarry escaped.

"Calm yourself, man," Zevran shouted at him urgently. "We need him!"

Alistair ignored him; the blade finally came free and he swung it wide, slashing across Zathrian's belly and tearing through the robes, opening a long cut across the flesh beneath as the mage scrambled to get away. Alistair snarled and gave chase -

A great white paw slammed him down, Witherfang pinning him to the ground before he could ruin our chance to dispel the curse. Her huge mouth snatched Zathrian up, trapping his arms, and he lay limply in her jaws while below him, Alistair struggled wildly, trying to claw himself out from under her and attack again.

"Alistair!" My heart in my throat, I fell to my knees beside him and grabbed his sword arm. "You'll hurt yourself! Stop!"

He growled, a dreadful, inhuman sound. Desperately, I pinned his arm down with one knee, jerked off his helmet and bent over him, grabbing his head in my hands and forcing him to look at me. "Alistair, come back," I begged. "It's over. Please, come back to me."

He shuddered and blinked blearily, drew in a deep breath and groaned, letting his head fall back to the dirt. "I feel awful," he mumbled.

"You look awful, you filthy thing," I almost laughed with relief. "Red blood, blue magic, brown dirt and green leaves? You look like a colorblind circus performer."

Witherfang removed her paw, but he didn't move to get up, just rolled slowly onto his back with a weak smile at my equally weak joke. "Rainbow armor is all the rage in the Orliesan court," he said, and I knew this crisis, at least, was past.

Witherfang deposited Zathrian in a heap on the ground, and re-formed as the Lady of the Forest before running to her wolves and fussing over their injuries. Zathrian seemed to be playing dead, which was probably a good idea because it allowed the males to concentrate on their charges. Swiftrunner sniffed his mate and children all over, growling softly at every scratch in her fur, and she licked the blood from his wounds.

"I cannot do it," Zathrian said at last from his place on the ground. He sounded beaten. "I am too old to forgive. All I can feel is hatred and pain."

"Keeper," Cammen said hesitantly, approaching him with care as one might a dangerous animal. "Please. We love you. Don't you love us? I will tell the others you sacrificed yourself to save us, and they will sing of your memory for ages to come."

"He should be reviled and his name struck from history," Gatekeeper rumbled, the only werewolf still paying attention at this point.

"If we have no forgiveness in our hearts, how can we expect any from him?" the Lady asked sharply, and he bowed his head submissively.

"You will die the moment I do, you know that," Zathrian told her.

"You are my maker, Zathrian," she replied softly. "You gave me form and consciousness where none existed. I have known pain and love, hope and fear, all the joy that is life. Yet of all things, I desire nothing more than an end. I beg you, maker, put an end to me. We beg you, have mercy."

"I... will," the Keeper said finally, the words coming as though dragged from a deep well of suffering. "Cammen... I hope you can forgive an old man his weakness."

"Of course, Keeper." The young hunter helped Zathrian to his feet, weeping openly.

Zathrian stood and swayed for a moment before Cammen handed him his staff. He began chanting in ancient Elvish, weaving light and shadow together with his hands, and as he did so, the vines and branches that formed the Lady of the Forest burst into bloom. She gazed at her flowering hands in wonder, and her wolves gathered sorrowfully around her, bowing their heads in farewell as with a bright flash of light, she vanished.

"Zathrian," Cammen sobbed, and I turned to see him crouched over the still form of the Keeper. The tortured man's face had softened in death, becoming peaceful and content, and I hoped he went to join his family.

The werewolves threw their heads back and howled their funeral dirge, an aching song that went on and on, until suddenly I realized the tone was changing, becoming a human voice. Then their bodies seemed almost to burst open, the fur peeling back from their skin and disappearing to reveal naked human flesh beneath. Bones creaked and they moaned in pain as their skeletons and muscles rearranged themselves, until, finally, it was all over. Swiftrunner cradled his human wife in his lap, their human babies at her breast, and gazed in astonishment at the loveliness of her new body and long, honey-blond hair.

"Well," Gatekeeper said in his brand-new manly baritone. He'd become a tall, rangy man with curly dark hair, shot through with gray. "This has been a busy day."

"What will you do now?" I asked him, but Swiftrunner answered me.

"We will leave the forest and look for other humans," he said, sounding slightly giddy at the thought. He bunched his massive shoulders and lifted his wife to her feet, and I hurriedly pulled my other tunic out of my pack and handed it to him to pull over her head. She smiled gratefully at us both, blue eyes shining. One baby whimpered in protest, and Swiftrunner gathered him close and kissed him as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

"We cannot simply let them wander about," Morrigan said abruptly. "Swiftrunner, you do not know how to hunt as a human, and no other human settlement will allow you to join as you are now. For one thing, humans place great importance on clothing, and you have none."

The werewolves looked down at their bare bodies in surprise, then at us and our many layers of fabric and leather and, in Alistair's case, steel. "Then what do we do?" Gatekeeper asked.

"We should demand the elves donate clothing," Morrigan suggested, grinning wickedly.

"Fine," I said, waving a hand at her. "You go with the – what are they now? Ex-werewolves, I guess. Go help them gather everyone together, and meet us at the elven encampment. We'll get clothes. Listen to Morrigan and do whatever she says, Swiftrunner."

The males stiffened, and if they still had hackles, they would probably have raised them, but I didn't really care. I would consider their feelings sometime when Alistair wasn't on death's door.

"Are you all right now?" I crouched beside him again and helped him to sit up.

He smiled wanly at me and nodded. "I will be, I think. I still feel like I've been wrung out and hung up to dry, but at least that -" he tipped his head toward the blood dripping from Zathrian's stomach, "doesn't smell delicious anymore."

"Gross," I shuddered.

Beside us, Cammen let out a shocked cry. The earth beneath Zathrian began to shake, and he scrambled away from the dead man as a sinkhole formed beneath him. Slowly, the Keeper's body sank into the forest's embrace, and the earth closed over him in silent forgiveness.

* * *

We started back to the Dalish as soon as we'd made sure Swiftrunner and his family were strong enough to seek out their pack again. Cammen estimated that we would return to the encampment the following evening; apparently Sundancer's den had been made somewhat closer to the elves and we could make good time now that we didn't have to track and sneak. How he knew this, I had no idea, but I didn't question the expert. Instead, I asked him something else.

"Cammen," I began, trotting along at his heels as he set a swift pace through the forest, as though eager to leave the trauma behind. "Why do you want to be a hunter?"

He missed a step and hesitated before finally admitting, "My father is a hunter. He put me in apprenticeship and now I have to finish. I _have_ to become a full hunter before..." He trailed off, blushing.

"What?"

"Gheyna," he said softly, his expression transforming into open adoration. "She is my heart's desire, but she won't bond with an apprentice. So I must finish my apprenticeship, for _her_."

Ah, girl trouble. I frowned a little. "You know hunters kill things. You don't seem all that into killing. Are you sure...?"

He shook his head stubbornly. "It's not all killing. I love the tracking. I'm good at it because I follow the animals, learn where they go and what they do."

"So you can kill them."

He flinched, and I was sorry for pressing the issue, but I felt I owed him anything I could do to help. "Do you really think Gheyna wants you to go against your nature for her? You're a good man, Cammen, a gentle and loving man, and you'll be a good husband and father. Don't bury all that just to please your dad."

He walked in silence for several long minutes before saying slowly, "I've proven that I _can_ kill a beast, now. Surely that would reassure Gheyna... right? She would know I could always become a true hunter if I needed to, to support our family."

"That's right," I nodded encouragingly. "That's your fallback plan. You have time to try to learn another trade before your family gets too demanding, even if she gets pregnant the first night. What would you rather do?"

He smiled shyly at me. "I would rather help raise the halla. My father say that is women's work, but..."

"That's a great idea! You were fantastic with the werewolf birth." I clapped my hands with excitement. "I'll talk to the halla herdmistress for you, okay? Put in a good word. And I'll tell Gheyna what an awesome hero you were, too. She'll want to _bond_ right there on the spot when I tell her what you did to save your clan."

Cammen snorted with suppressed laughter, turning brilliant red, and I let him take the lead again, falling back to walk in the rear with poor, worn-out Alistair.

He didn't have much to say, and I didn't blame him. I think we both felt pretty shaken by his close call; when I remembered that bestial growl coming from _his_ throat, I went cold all over. But he didn't hurt me, I told myself firmly. Even half-crazed, he wouldn't hurt _me_.

That night he lingered around the campfire, poking it listlessly long after everyone else had sought their blankets, until finally I told him, "You're excused from watch tonight, remember? It's my turn. Go to bed."

He stopped poking the fire, but didn't get up. I watched him bite his lip as he struggled to put something into words, until I patted his shoulder and said, "Just spit it out, it doesn't have to be in iambic pentameter."

"Nobody else got sick," he blurted, a flush beginning to creep up his cheeks.

"Magic is weird, don't think too hard about it," I shrugged.

"Everyone can sneak but me," he added glumly.

That one threw me. I frowned at him and asked, "Is there a connection here that I'm missing?"

"You – you're special," he tried to explain. "And you're so little, and quick, and graceful..."

"If you call me cute, I'll slap you," I warned, but in jest. I knew I was cute, and used that to my advantage sometimes.

"I understand if you would rather be with someone more like you," he said finally, drawing himself up into an expression of noble self-sacrifice. "You don't owe me anything. I value our _friendship_."

"Astyth's iron _arse_, this is about Zevran again, isn't it?" I demanded incredulously. "I don't _want_ Zevran. I don't even think he wants me. It's a game he plays, don't you get it?"

"I don't see why you wouldn't rather have him. He's handsome, and suave, and... experienced. Leliana says girls really go for guys like him. And he doesn't _loom_ like I do, I'm like an ogre compared to you two."

"I'm going to kill Leliana," I muttered. "I'm going to tell you this once, and I'm not going to say it again, all right? Listen."

"Yes, ser," he muttered, avoiding my gaze. I tried to see his expression in the flickering light from the dying fire. Paragon's mercy - he really did think I preferred Zevran, and that it would be perfectly reasonable for me to just dump him for someone more interesting. He'd probably even expected it - assumed that eventually some other man would come along and I would want an upgrade.

I sighed and looked around the campsite for some sort of visual aid, finally spying a slender young tree swaying gently in the breeze. "Zevran is like that tree there," I said, pointing. "Beautiful and elegant, and strong in its own way, bending without breaking, growing despite the overwhelming odds. But that's not what I need."

Then I made a broader gesture with both hands, indicating a very large, round, imaginary shape. "Pretend there's a big boulder there, okay? That's you. You're the rock under my feet, the stone at my back, my granite fortress, a strong foundation for – for anything and everything. I couldn't do any of this without you."

He stared at me in vague disbelief for a long moment before looking away, blinking rapidly as though to hide tears. "Tisha, I – I don't – I mean, I haven't ever – I don't even know what to _do_ with a girl," he stammered miserably.

"You can start by not pushing me away all the time," I snapped, starting to lose patience with all the insecurity.

"I'm sorry."

I watched him squirm for a minute or two, sitting with one knee bent and his arm draped over it, until he flexed his wrist uncomfortably. "Does that still hurt?" I asked.

"Yes."

I got up on my knees and kissed the back of his sore wrist. "There. All better."

"You put Wynne to shame," he said, smiling finally. He reached out with his good hand and combed his fingers through my hair – I was getting the impression he really _liked_ hair – before moving his hand to my shoulder and tucking me under his arm. I made a happy sound and nestled my cheek against his chest.

"See, you're a natural," I told him.

He chuckled a little and for a few minutes we watched the coals pop and settle before I was reminded of the passage of time and sat up. "You should still try to sleep, though," I said reluctantly.

"I'm not looking forward to what fresh nightmares the Archdemon might give me after today," he admitted, but he stood up anyway. "Good night, then."

"I'll miss you."

He paused for an instant, in the act of ducking under his tent flap, then whispered, "Miss you too," before disappearing into the deeper darkness inside.

* * *

The following morning, when I dragged myself sandy-eyed from my tent, Alistair pounced on me and scooped me up by the waist, whirling me around twice while I laughed and wrapped my arms around his neck. Then he held me close, his arms warm and strong around me, and kissed me full on the mouth. I stiffened in surprise, and then sighed against him, feeling his lips warm and soft and oh-so-welcome on mine, and when he started to put me back down, I almost refused to let go.

But no, better not to embarrass him. I slid to the ground, raking my fingers through my mussy hair and grinning like a fool. Alistair shot a triumphant look at Zevran, who threw up his hands.

"Clearly, you are the better man, my friend," he said with a broad grin.

"Right," Alistair said a bit hoarsely, ruffling his hair and blushing furiously. "I'll just... Get some water." And he fled.

"Congratulations, _Carina_," Zevran said to me with a smirk. "Well done. Our bashful friend was difficult prey, I'm sure."

"Oh hush, you," I laughed, slapping his shoulder, and got back to the serious business of breakfast for Gray Wardens.

* * *

_Sundancer and her pack now have their own spin-off, called Wolf Whistles. Also, I always put the ETA of the next chapters in my profile, if you're wondering what the heck I'm doing and wish I would hurry up already. I know, I'm sorry, I wish I could do nothing but write Dragon Age for you, but the chores and the clients, they suck up time like leeches._


	36. Reparations

_Thanks for serenbach, Velf, interesting2125, Enaid Aderyn, Nithu, Arsinoe de Blassenville, Sin Piedad, and The Fall for your reviews! They make my day :D Also thanks to mille libri for beta duty and answering the question "OH GOD IS THIS AWFUL I THINK IT'S AWFUL OH GOD NOW WHAT."_

* * *

Later that morning, after we'd broken camp and struck out for the clan, Alistair fell in beside me and pulled at my sleeve until I'd fallen behind the group to talk to him.

"That wasn't too soon, was it?" he asked, wringing his hands in comical uncertainty.

"_Too _-" I bit back the incredulous exclamation and accompanying eye-roll just in time, choosing instead to take his hand and say, "No, definitely not too soon. Although, if you really want to be sure, then we should do more testing."

He giggled and blushed at himself for doing so, and let me pull him along after Cammen.

We reached the Dalish encampment in late afternoon, and climbed unchallenged over the folded earth. Cammen was frowning and looking around and above us for the absent guards, but the reason for their absence became clear when we crested the earthworks and saw what had happened in the camp while we were gone.

The clusters of hospital beds lay in shredded ruin, and their former occupants had been strung out on ropes like junkyard dogs, anchored to landships, trees and anything else sturdy enough to restrain them. They slumped quietly in their places now, but the torn-up earth and their broken, bloody fingernails told of how violently they had tried to claw their way free. Every healthy adult elf stood guard just outside their reach, steadfastly ignoring their prisoners with grim, tired eyes.

"It's all right, it's over!" Cammen called, running down the berm and waving his arms to attract their attention. "The curse is undone! Zathrian gave his life to save us!"

Every hollow-eyed face turned towards him, and one by one, the sick elves struggled to their feet. Some swayed and looked almost dead, ribs visible beneath tattered clothing, while others seemed merely tired, but at some signal I couldn't catch, or perhaps moved by the spirit, every throat in camp burst into song. The ancient hymn was in elvish, but it spoke even to me of the the mingled grief and joy of the honored fallen. After a few measures, Leliana joined in, tears streaming down her cheeks.

* * *

"But I think all the survivors will make a full recovery," Wynne concluded her report as we lounged around a roaring bonfire and waited for dinner. "We lost several, who escaped and had to be put down, or who managed to get at each other and fight. I did my best to keep them asleep, but I can only cast that spell so many times before becoming exhausted."

"You did great," I told her sincerely. "I'm sure you saved many lives."

She smiled tightly, sadly, and I knew she still felt she hadn't done enough. I remembered her despair at every young body we'd passed in the broken Tower, every mage she hadn't been able to save from Uldred and the abominations, and patted her arm. "You're too hard on yourself, Wynne. Get some rest."

"Yes, rest would be... welcome," she sighed, looking old for the first time since leaving the Tower. But she didn't seek her bed right away, instead fingering the embroidered sleeve of her official Circle robe. Finally, she asked, "Was the Tower the first time you'd ever seen an abomination?"

"Well, there was Connor, but I don't think he counts," I said, remembering almost losing my lunch after seeing that first bloated, slavering hunger abomination.

"He was possessed by a demon, was he not?" she asked sharply. "Then he was an abomination."

"Connor was still in there, fighting," I explained, rubbing my forehead. Was he in the Tower now? Was he frightened and lonely? "He resisted the demon's evil, he only wanted to save his father. That's how we were able to save him. If he'd been all mutated and nasty, we'd have killed him."

Wynne nodded slowly. "Madness and cruelty are the hallmarks of an abomination. If those are lacking, if he fought them because he still felt human compassion and love, then yes... He was no abomination. And of course, the reverse would also be true. I never thought of it that way."

_And that means we didn't slaughter all your students_, I thought. _Glad I could help lay that to rest_. I stopped her nervous fiddling with her sleeve by giving her hand a reassuring squeeze. Then Lanaya approached us, asking what we wanted for reward, and I waved her off, telling her we'd work it all out tomorrow, "because now, we eat!"

She laughed, and I was gratified to see that the clan's new Keeper knew how. Zathrian had looked as though he hadn't laughed in a thousand years.

Then all conversation ceased, because dinner was ready. The recovering hunters ate ravenously, surpassing even the Gray Wardens, and then made their way at long last to their family landships. The reunions of wives with husbands and children with parents had gone on for the whole evening, and even now it was hard not to dwell on those broken families whose fragments lurked around the edges of the camp, mourning for hunters who had not been so lucky.

* * *

The following day we spent helping the elves repair their broken furniture and wash the soiled bedding, preparing them to move their camp as soon as possible. The clan clearly wished to leave this place and its suffering behind them. As for ourselves, we were stuck here until Morrigan brought word that the ex-werewolves were assembled and ready to move.

In the meantime, Alistair and I hammered out some details with Lanaya about the treaties. To our surprise, Zathrian had remembered them and told her they were to be honored, and she readily agreed to touch base regularly with us so we could communicate about where the battle would be fought.

"And we will need five dozen basic sets of clothing," I added at the end of our conversation. "We're taking the new humans that Zathrian freed, and they're all naked. We're hoping to incorporate them into the human army, where they'll be taken care of and kept disciplined while they learn to get along with other humans."

She pressed her lips together, but gave no other sign of anger at being asked to help their old enemies. Leliana had told all the elven elders a wonderfully embroidered tale of Zathrian's heartfelt forgiveness of the poor werewolves, and how it had all been a big misunderstanding, and various other pleasant half-truths that secured Zathrian's place in lore as a hero and the werewolves' as tragic figures instead of villains.

Alistair himself took the responsibility of talking to Cammen's father and explaining the young man's choice in career. He didn't take it very well, but agreed at least not to disown the boy for taking "woman's work." Gheyna, for her part, needed no convincing to welcome her conquering hero and the two had not been seen since shortly after his return, resulting in much risque speculation from Zevran.

By sunset, enough hunters had met with success that the scent of roasting deer and boar filled the encampment and the roaring bonfires raised the temperature to something approximating the Orzammar Commons. The wounded had continued to recover and the fact that their ordeal was over had finally begun to sink in, and there was an almost carnival atmosphere among the elves as laughing men and women sliced off chunks of steaming roast meat and heaped their platters with fruits and salad from the buffet.

"_I don't want to ask him, you ask him!_"

I perked up my ears at whispered exchange and saw a twittering flock of elven girls, clustered together in appealing shyness and debating who would ask Zevran... something evidently very important. The discussion looked like it may go on for some time, and I glanced at the Antivan elf to see if he'd noticed. Of course he had, and that reminded me of a question I'd been meaning to ask.

"So Zevran," I began with a grin, interrupting his lurid staring. He turned at once and directed his brilliantly toothy smile at me.

"Yes, my lovely?"

I changed tacks at once, and pretended to glower. "How can you say that when you – you _ogle_ those girls right in front of me!" Then I covered my face in my hands and faked a pitiful sob. "Don't you know how it makes me feel?"

"But my dear, surely you can never doubt your place in my heart!" Zevran placed one hand on his breast and affected a noble pose. "Truly no other damsel could ever surpass you in beauty."

"'Place in your heart'? I don't think your heart was doing the thinking," I scoffed, then returned to my original topic. "Really, though, I was curious. How come I don't see any half-elves around? By now, surely you could have founded an entire new race with your work-related conquests alone."

He laughed, flashing those pearly whites again. "All children of mixed human and elven parentage are fully humans. There are no half-breeds."

"Really?" I asked, fascinated. "What about dwarves? Can dwarves have half-breed children with elves?"

"No," he said, and then dropped his voice to a suggestive murmur, "but they can with humans." He winked at Alistair, who was frowning in blissfully ignorant contemplation of the buffet table. I laughed and swatted his arm, and he went back to lounging elegantly in his folding chair so that the firelight played over his golden skin for the benefit of the elven girls, who tittered.

After the meal, the carcasses were cleared away from the fires and various people brought out their instruments, flutes and soft drums made with halla leather and played with the hands instead of drumsticks. Someone gave Wynne a cup of hot berry wine, the flock of admiring girls finally got up the courage to ask Zevran to dance, Leliana convinced Lanaya to teach her the songs in her ritual songbook, I insinuated myself into the drum circle, and Alistair had plenty of smooth, tight, bare elven midriffs to pretend he wasn't watching.

"See, look, you hold it between your knees like this, isn't that clever? And the halla leather is way softer and nicer than nugskin," I told him happily, having lugged the borrowed drum over to show him.

"Uh-huh," he said, keeping a covert eye on Zevran's undulating harem.

"And if you play it long enough, you turn orange," I added, grinning.

"Uh-huh."

"And grow a tail."

"Uh-huh – wait, what?" He shook himself and looked at the drum in surprise. "A tail?"

I burst out laughing and mussed his hair with one hand. "I'm just teasing. I'm sure Zevran would be happy to share, you know, if you asked him."

"Um, no, I don't think I'll do that," he mumbled, blushing beet-red. "I'm just going – I think I'll just get something to drink."

I watched him go, considering making some sort of joke about cold showers, when it occurred to me that I, myself, had not really bathed since … practically forever. Yuck. I recalled the sandy pool just outside the camp where the girls had taken their laundry, and wondered if perhaps it would be empty now, with everyone busy celebrating their survival.

I returned the borrowed drum and collected Rocky from where he had been making eyes at a small, black-and-white drover dog that belonged to the herdmistress. The little dog was coldly ignoring him, turning up her dainty nose at the uncouth warhound in favor of lying faithfully at her mistress's feet.

"Come on, old man, she thinks she's too good for you," I told him, pulling him along by the collar while he cast wistful looks over his shoulder. "We'll find you a nice Mabari bitch, all right? You guys can make tons of adorable Mabari puppies, and we'll raise them on a diet of darkspawn and Archdemon blood, sound good?"

He woofed in fierce affirmative and followed more willingly after that.

The spreading pool, welling from some deep underground spring that I suspected might have been opened up specifically for this encampment, reflected silver moonlight and the green flashing of the fireflies that danced on its far edge. I pulled off my trousers, socks, boots and leathers, and waded into the warm water in my tunic – I didn't feel quite comfortable being completely naked in the forest, even with Rocky to guard.

I shut my eyes and ducked underwater, managing to swim a few strokes this way and that despite the shallowness of the pool, wanting to stay in practice since life on the surface seemed to involve a lot of water and someday I might have to really swim, scary though that was. The only water for swimming back home was the calidarium, and a careless swimmer would bonk her knees on the stone bottom. Then there was Ortan Thaig and its river, but the water chilled to the bone in minutes and wasn't anyone's idea of a good time.

I scrubbed at my hair, worked sand against my grass-stained hands and knees, and tried to get the stains out of my tunic. Then I felt the swelling warmth of Alistair's approach and looked up, squinting through the trees in the direction of camp.

"What are you doing wandering around alone in the dark?" he asked with a concerned frown.

Rocky barked indignantly, and I said, "See? Rocky's here. And now so are you. I knew you wouldn't leave me alone for long anyway, once you noticed I'd gone."

"Even so, you ought to – _oh._" He stopped, finally noticing the pile of discarded clothing beside the pool, and immediately stuffed his hands in his pockets and stared at his boots.

"It's okay, I'm still in my tunic and it's practically a dress, it's so big. I'm done now anyway," I told him and stood up, wading to shore while squeezing the water out of my hair.

When I stepped barefoot onto the sand, he risked a glance in my direction and froze. The wet cloth clung to me, tracing the rounded curves of muscle in my hips and thighs and dripping water down my calves, the tickling sensation and the cool breeze making my poor cold nipples stand out against the fabric. I stopped in front of him and he swallowed, hard.

"Hi," I said shyly, wondering what he would do now, especially after what had happened yesterday. He was still here, he hadn't turned red and run off, and that was good, right?

"Hi," he said, his voice dropping an octave and coming out deeper, rougher. I cocked my head to look up at him, reached out and touched his hand. He shivered, and dropped to his knees.

I grinned at that, his face now within reach, and stepped into him, enjoying being taller for once as he tilted his chin up to meet me. Our lips touched, light and soft, and I drew back and opened my eyes to make sure he was okay, that I wasn't making another mistaken assumption.

His eyes _burned_, and for a moment I feared I'd just bit off more than I could chew – I wasn't _ready_ – but then his fingertips came to rest so lightly and gently on my waist, and I couldn't be afraid of him. He sighed and leaned against me a little, and closed his eyes to feel my breasts and belly against his firm chest. I know, because I'd closed mine for the same reason. He wrapped his arms around me and I leaned into the contact with a sigh.

It's not like he hadn't touched me before, many times. He'd leaned on me, picked me up, hugged me and roughhoused with me, but all that had been for companionship and for comfort. This... was different. His body felt new; I ran my hands lingeringly over his shoulders and felt his doing something similar, venturing over my back and waist, almost tentative in his care.

That wasn't new – he was always careful with me. Annoyingly so, in other circumstances, when I wanted a good firm hug. But now, with the simmering edge of fear flickering in the back of my mind... He held me like fine crystal, like something lovely and exquisite and worthy of care.

Because, to him, I was.

I took his head in my hands and captured his mouth, suddenly eager for more. He gave a grunt of surprise that quickly became a moan as I invited him to follow my lead, tipping his face slightly and licking his lips. He didn't need to be shown twice, and it was my turn to moan as his fingers tangled in my damp hair and welcomed me deeper.

His other hand dropped to the small of my back, broad and strong, and pulled me snug against him. I could feel him smiling and it made me happy; I giggled at his throaty purr of appreciation as he caressed the curve of my hip. Encouraged, he slid his hand low over my bottom. Dread instantly poured over me like a bucket of ice water; I flinched and jumped back before he touched anything _forbidden_.

"I'm sorry! I wouldn't-" he started, catching my hands.

I clamped down on the hated fear, shoved it back and made myself smile coyly. "Nuh-uh, naughty man," I pretended to scold, shaking a trembling finger at him. "I'm saving that for later."

He grinned and said in (mostly) mock contrition, "I am a very naughty man. I'm very very sorry. Can you ever forgive me?"

He held out his arms, and I buried my face in his neck, fingers curling involuntarily into fists as I clung to his tunic, willing myself not to shiver, or breathe too fast, or otherwise indicate that anything untoward had just happened. He stroked my hair and hummed quietly to himself, rocking us slowly from side to side. Gradually the adrenaline settled out of my blood and my heart ceased its terrified pounding, and eventually I uncurled my hands and hugged him tightly.

"I suppose we should head back before they send out a search party," I said.

"Mm," he said, his breath warm on my skin. "But then I'd have to let you go."

I stilled, suddenly, breathlessly aware of his lips brushing my neck.

"Oh, but you feel cold," he said then, and pulled back, rubbing my arms briskly. "We should get you into dry clothes."

"I'm not cold-" I started to protest, although this was completely untrue because the breeze _was_ chilly. He raised an eyebrow at me to let me know he wasn't fooled and stood up to grab my boots and trousers and toss them to me, before tucking me under his arm to head back to camp.

Some awkwardness in matching up our different strides led to much shoving and silliness, and ended with me hanging onto him by the waist and taking two steps for each of his, both of us smiling and giggling in a way that likely left no doubt in anyone's mind what we had been doing. We passed Cammen and Gheyna on the way back, wearing similar expressions; Gheyna and I beamed at each other while our men blushed furiously.

* * *

Later, as I snuggled up to Rocky's warm flank in my tent and tried to sleep, I wondered just how sensitive Alistair was, whether he knew I'd been upset, whether he knew why. He wasn't the fool he sometimes acted like, and he had been _so_ gentle, and _so_ nice. More importantly, how long would his patience last before he gave up in disgust?

He was handsome and charming and if he set foot in the Commons, he would instantly be up to his eyeballs in luscious, willing noble hunters with tits like feather pillows. He could do so much better than... than another man's broken, discarded plaything.

"We'll just have to see how it goes, I guess," I told Rocky, squirming closer to use his furry shoulder as a pillow and throwing an arm around him. He raised a foreleg, suggesting I scratch his chest since my hand was in the neighborhood anyway, and I obliged him, glad that not all relationships have to be complicated.


	37. Alone, Together

The elves were packed and ready to leave by the end of the next day. They would spend one last night in the camp, eating a cold supper to avoid dirtying more pots than necessary since everything was packed up, and then head out on their way. We still had no word from Morrigan and the werewolves. _Ex_-werewolves.

As I sat leaning on Alistair's bent knee and chewing meditatively on venison jerky, an iron-haired elf with the quick and competent attitude of a master craftsman approached us carrying a long, hardened leather case. He knelt before me and held it out; I opened it to reveal a short bow with a deep, double-S curve, very different from the straight shafts of the longbow Cammen used.

"What's this?" I asked curiously, stroking the smooth, blue-tinged wood.

"A gift," he said in a quiet, steady voice.

"You don't have to," I protested rather weakly. It was a _very_ pretty bow. "Lanaya already gave us surety and tons of supplies."

"This is personal," he explained, pressing it back into my lap when I moved to return it to him. "For my daughter, my Gheyna. For helping Cammen, so they can be happy together. I doubt he could ever have been content as a hunter, and yet, without your influence, he would even now be trying to please his father."

"Glad we could help." I blinked awkwardly and looked down at the bow, embarrassed at his sincere gratitude. "Uhm... So, what is this? It's... different?"

"It's a recurve, designed for smaller hunters," he said tactfully. "A standard longbow would be quite inconvenient for you, and crossbows are so slow and ugly."

I nodded. I'd never bothered with crossbows because reloading and cocking them, not to mention maintaining the cocking mechanism and lugging the big heavy thing around, never seemed worth it in the cramped, poorly-lit Deep Roads. But I would be very glad of a weapon that could take advantage of the absurdly vast, empty, _wasted_ space up here on the surface. "Thank you," I told him, grasping his hand. "It's beautiful." He bowed his head respectfully and returned to his packing.

"Ooh! Latitia! He gave you the bow!" Leliana came trotting over from where she'd been washing up, and fingered the soft leather grip with evident pleasure. "I told him you didn't have one. You'll like it."

"I do already. Can you teach me to use it?"

She nodded and fetched a flat, rectangular valise from her luggage. It opened to reveal three pieces of wood, which she quickly locked together into a bow very much like mine, but even shorter and more deeply curved.

"Nice," Zevran noted, sauntering over. "An Orlesian takedown. I should have guessed. Do you also have the concealment harness? That I should like to see."

Leliana shot him a glare but by now I was curious, and fished a strappy leather contraption out of the case. She sighed and demonstrated how the harness could strap the pieces of the bow to her thigh, to be concealed under a dress. My eyes widened.

"That looks like an assassin's weapon," I said with surprise. "Leliana, what were you _doing_ before you came to Lothering? I thought you were singing songs and dancing and doing your hair!"

"I was," she said shortly, color rising in her cheeks. "But sometimes, in Orlais, a bard is called upon to perform more politically sensitive tasks. Things requiring discretion, subtlety, a minimum of collateral damage."

Zevran nodded. "Yes, indeed. A bard is much like a Crow, but with a prettier voice and better plumage, my Orlesian bluebird."

"Anyway," she continued, flushed. "I left all that behind when I fled. I am _not_ a murderer, not anymore. I am doing the Maker's work, now."

"Does the Maker's work include teaching me to shoot?" I asked, changing the subject before anyone embarrassed her further. I understood quite well that sometimes a person would rather not talk about their previous employment. Though, I did wonder what it meant that she had left her lute behind, but kept _this._

"Yes, I think it does," she said in obvious relief. "We'll begin in the morning, when there's light."

* * *

The elves moved out the following day, and the forest filled in the campsite like waves crashing together again after a stone is dropped into still water. The ground shifted dizzyingly under out feet, and within moments, the forest floor smoothed itself out and left us standing around in the shrubbery, barely any sign that the elves had camped here at all except for some crushed moss and ferns where the earth had been folded up for too long and the tender plants had died.

Leliana taught me to use my new bow, sort of, but it was too heavy for me to draw fully yet. "You'll get stronger quickly," she assured me. "You're just using muscles that you don't normally use so heavily. We'll practice every day."

After that, we killed time for a while practicing disarming each other and Zevran. Then we convinced Wynne to hex us (mildly) so Alistair could practice cleansing it, his impressive victory over Zathrian having convinced everyone that the skill was worth the discomfort of waking up on the ground after the disorientation spell worked a little too well.

"Hey! Look! Look!"

In the late afternoon, the bright and excited voice of a young boy came to us through the trees, quickly echoed by many other cries of , "Look! Look! Hey! Look!"

"Yes, we know it's the Wardens, now stop that inane barking, you are not dogs!" Morrigan's voice silenced the calls, and we watched as a dreary procession made its way to us through the trees.

Morrigan led the pack of ex-werewolves – we were going to have to come up with a better name for them – who followed with their eyes on the ground, walking gingerly with their bare feet on the forest floor. They looked hungry and tired, and many bore scrapes and bruises where they must have counted on their thick hide and fur to protect them, only to be reminded that they had fragile human skin now.

Swiftrunner strode beside Morrigan, making a point of not showing any discomfort with his new body and flanked by another male with an aggressive stance, and behind him Gatekeeper, Sundancer, and a new female with black hair each carried one of the babies. Poor Sundancer seemed drained and nearly exhausted; her attendants cuddled the infants against their chests like the precious treasures they were.

"Long trip, I take it?" I asked Morrigan, handing her my water flask.

"You have no idea," she snorted, waving me away. "They are like ignorant children. Everything must be explained to them."

"I'm sorry, I thought you would be able to understand how they felt," I said a touch coldly. "Considering you yourself had to learn such basics as how to shake hands and say hello, when you first left the Wilds."

"I did not say I was not up to the task," she snapped. "Merely that it is a great deal of work."

"Right, yes, before we dissolve into general quarreling, why don't we hand out some food and clothing," Alistair interrupted, glaring at Morrigan before picking up one of the bags of jerky and handing it to Swiftrunner to distribute. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground, blushing in sympathetic embarrassment for the naked women. Thank the ancestors they lived in a forest and hadn't been sunburned head to toe.

The allocation of food and clothing took much longer than I expected, a complicated dance of precedence and hierarchy resulting in some of them having two pairs of shoes and others having just socks, and somehow Sundancer herself ended up with almost half the food even though she seemed barely able to pick at it, the males constantly coming over and dropping parts of their ration in front of her.

Despite the urgency of getting back to Bodahn and civilization, we ended up camping there that night to give the – damn it, _whatever_ they are now – time for their feet to recover somewhat, and to rest and eat. Alistair built a half-dozen campfires for them and showed them how to add wood and keep them burning, and they clustered around in wary astonishment, holding their hands out to the warmth.

"What should we call you now? We can't call you ex-werewolves," I said to Swiftrunner that night during a rare moment of quiet when he wasn't being constantly pestered for instructions and advice. "If for no other reason than because it would be dangerous for the other humans to know."

"We are the People," he said shortly.

"So is everyone else," I said after a moment's startled hesitation, trying not to sound condescending. "Every group thinks they are people. So, we should pick a new name for you."

"We should call them a tribe," Leliana cut in. "The Wolf Tribe. That will explain any oddness of mannerisms. Other humans will assume they are still learning civilized etiquette - which is true."

"Fine." He sighed and bunched his massive shoulders, getting to his feet in an odd sort of rolling motion where he used his hands to push himself up. I made a mental note to teach them not to do that. Then he strode away to break up a squabble between some of the younger males.

That left my comrades and me sitting alone around our fire. The tribe had quite naturally kept to themselves, eyeballing us with interest but too cautious yet to approach and make conversation.

Concentrating on my food, I felt a tickle on my arm and flinched involuntarily, then looked more closely at the tiny thing that crawled across my skin. It had eight long, spindly legs and a set of minuscule curved pincers.

"Morrigan," I said, pointing it out to her. "Is this a spider? Why is it so tiny?"

"All normal insects are small on the surface world," she said, peering closely at it. "That one is harmless. See the long legs? It weaves elaborate webs to catch its prey, other tiny insects, like flies."

"Spiders in the Deep Roads are as big as me," I said, watching the spider carefully attach a thread of silk to my arm and then rappel down to the ground. "I knew you had little bugs up here, but I didn't know... I guess I didn't think of spiders as bugs."

"'Tis the lyrium that allows them to grow so large," she explained, turning back to the rabbit she had caught for herself.

"Wow, now that is ironic," I said. When she raised an eyebrow at me, I explained, "That being underground makes spiders big but makes us small."

She chuckled briefly, and I had a thought. "If I have babies now, on the surface, would they grow tall or stay short like me?"

"I imagine that would depend on the father," she replied, casting a snide glance at Alistair, who sat next to me watching the spider with mild distaste, but Wynne suddenly sat up ramrod-straight and stared hard at him.

"Why does she not know?" Wynne demanded of Alistair, who flushed and looked at his boots.

"Duncan didn't tell her," he mumbled, barely audible. "I guess he didn't have time."

"What's this?" I asked, looking worriedly from one to the other and forgetting about the spider.

"Alistair has something to tell you," Wynne said gently.

"Now?" he asked, a note of panic creeping into his voice.

"Yes, now." _Her_ voice was pure steel, and he sighed and stood up.

"Let's go for a walk," he said quietly, taking my hand.

I followed him, mystified and more than a little afraid, as he led me some distance away from the campsite. Rocky trotted along after us, bringing his bone and occasionally tossing it into the air and catching it again with a happy slurping noise.

"There's more to the taint than being able to sense darkspawn and each other," Alistair said, his eyes on the game trail we'd fallen onto. He paused for a long moment while we crossed a small clearing sparkling with fireflies. I stopped walking to watch them and we stood together in the dark.

"I know the Wardens come down to the Deep Roads to die," I told him, breaking the tense silence. "I assume it's to do with the taint. I'm not afraid."

He sighed. "There's that, yeah, but... It also - it's really, really hard for Gray Wardens to have children, even if their partner is a regular person."

I froze, his words an unexpected wrench at my heart. "No... children? Not _ever_?"

I hadn't really thought about children, not when there was no father for them. But I guess I'd liked the idea that I could try, if I wanted to, someday. Only now I couldn't. I choked back a sob of indescribable loss.

"I'm sorry," he said softly. "I should have thought about it earlier. I just - in the men's barracks it's sort of a joke, you know? Like, ha-ha, now you don't have to worry about getting someone knocked up by accident. And before that I was in the Chantry for so long, and Templars don't have families, either. I wasn't thinking it might be different for – for someone who could have been a mother."

"It's not your fault," I whispered, blinking hard as my eyes filled. It was Duncan's fault. I was almost angry at him, but then I remembered what would have happened if he hadn't taken me away to be a Warden.

"It's still better than dying alone on the Roads," I told him, sharing the thought. Then I remembered how all Gray Wardens die, and laughed bitterly. "I mean, it's better than having _already_ died alone on the Roads. I've at least put it off for a while."

"We've got about thirty years," he said, sitting cross-legged on the soft grass.

"That's not so bad. Spares us the indignity of old age." I sat beside him and leaned on his arm. I didn't want him to think I was mad at him. I wasn't. But I was going to need a while to … to absorb what he'd said.

Suddenly too tired to think about it any more and desperate for a distraction, I asked, "Is there anything good about being a Gray Warden? Please tell me there's _something_ good about it."

He grinned. "We used to ride griffins. They're extinct now, but still – imagine flying!"

I smiled a little, envisioning the great white beasts of legend, and he went on, telling me about mighty battles and the camaraderie of whole battalions of Wardens fighting together, all sharing the call of the demon's blood and making it our own.

"And the training's the best in the world," he added. "Even when I was in the Chantry and I hated it there, it was still good to train and get better at something, you know?"

I nodded, feeling the roughness of his tunic under my cheek and warm body beneath. "There's satisfaction in a skill perfected. But what about now, when it's just us?"

"There's more Wardens in Orlais, lots of them. I think there's some in the Free Marches and other places, too, I just have no idea how to contact them and even if I did, it'd take weeks for a messenger to get there and months before they could mobilize and come to help. But at least we're not the last in the world, right?"

I breathed a sigh of relief. "At least someone out there knows what they're doing."

"I suppose eventually we'll have to start rebuilding the order here in Ferelden. Once we get rid of this pesky Archdemon."

"He's really a nuisance. I wonder if he doesn't know how annoying he is. Maybe it's all just a plea for attention. Maybe his daddy didn't give him enough hugs," I suggested.

"What a revolutionary new Blight-fighting technique," he laughed, shifting a little in the grass to wrap an arm around my shoulders and pull me closer. "We'll hug him into submission. On the Feast of Satinalia we'll give him a sack full of toys and candy, and the darkspawn will all put down their weapons and become gardeners and wear bright pink dresses."

"Deep down, darkspawn just want to be pretty," I nodded solemnly.

He chuckled, and for a while we just sat and watched the fireflies. Despite my bravado, I felt very small and alone. I couldn't help but notice how much of being a Warden required that there be _more than just two_. And being reminded that the closest I would ever come to "going home" would be my Calling... had hurt.

The night breeze had picked up and I shivered, and abruptly gave up on being brave and climbed into Alistair's lap, curling up tight against his chest. "You're very important," I whispered, clinging to him. "Please try not to get killed."

"I do my best," he said lightly.

"I mean it. Please. You're all I have left."

He didn't say anything, but he leaned his cheek on the top of my head and his arms tightened around me. After a long moment, he said quietly, "I don't know what I did to deserve... you. But I won't let you down."

Something restless inside me, some small, frightened animal, settled down at last as the slow thrumming of his heart drowned out the incessant crickets and surface noises, and in the end, finally warm and safe, I slept.

* * *

_Thank you to everyone who has read and reviewed, and also, if you're interested in the werewolves, their own story is off and running and you can find it in my profile. As usual, you are all thoroughly awesome. Pats on the back for everyone!_


	38. Moving Out

I woke up enough to grumble when he laid me down on my bedroll back at camp, and squirmed around peevishly until I was more or less comfortable again, half-aware of Leliana interrogating Alistair - "Is she all right? What did you tell her?"

"'M'fine, leave 'im alone," I muttered, finally shutting her up.

In the morning, we gathered the Wolf Tribe together to explain the situation to them. We had decided what to do with them while we awaited their arrival, and told Swiftrunner what to say so he could relay the information to his people; he insisted this was necessary or they would protest at taking orders from strangers. "And tiny dwarf women," was the unspoken subtext.

"My people," he began in a declamatory tone. They settled into place like attentive schoolchildren, and I smiled. They were pretty cute. "The Gray Wardens have promised to help us join human society. It is their belief that our best hope is to join a human war pack in a territory known as Redcliffe, where we will be given a den and training for our new lives."

He waited while the pack mulled this over, muttering to each other and fidgeting a great deal, until he waved a hand for them to settle down and went on. "Humans, like us, are suspicious of strangers," he told them seriously, and they nodded. "If they are to accept us into their territory, we must learn to look like them, wear clothing properly and speak and act like they do. Consider how we wore marsh mud to hide our scents when hunting deer."

The ones that were wearing their clothes looked down at them in a new light, some of them holding up the cloth and sniffing it. Others, too subordinate to have clothes or too uncomfortable to wear them, eyed the clothed ones enviously.

"To that end," he concluded, "we will follow the Wardens for some weeks as they travel to the great human den called Denerim – a most suitable name, I think – and from there, to Redcliffe. We must learn as much as we can while we travel with them, for their time is short and we have not a day to waste. I expect all of you to attend most carefully to them. Listen, and obey. If any of you cause trouble, you will answer to me. Understood?"

"Yes, Alpha," came the loud chorus from his pack as they all ducked their heads ritualistically.

Swiftrunner, having given his command, strode off stage (metaphorically) to get his breakfast, everyone else waiting patiently for their turn. Meanwhile, Gatekeeper stood up in his place to take care of the messy details.

"Now, I want everyone to wear their shoes, and nobody is permitted to keep more than one pair. Extra shoes belong to the Alpha and he shall give them as he sees fit, understood? The same goes for clothing, nobody is to hoard clothing..."

And he went on and on, while behind him, Swiftrunner calmly ate his porridge and invited his wife to do the same. She looked terrible, pale and thin, and Wynne frowned when she shook her head at the offer of food. Gatekeeper introduced us all, gave a rather awkward account of our relative skills and position in the "Warden Pack," and told everyone that I was Alistair's mate.

"What? No-" Alistair spluttered in horrified embarrassment, blushing furiously.

"You wish them to respect and obey her, do you not?. It is easier for them to obey a small young female if they think she is the alpha male's mate," Gatekeeper murmured to him.

"This is the worst wedding ever," I muttered to Alistair, who was sunk in appalled anticipation of the jokes Zevran would make, the latter's feline eyes glittering with suppressed mirth.

He managed a weak smile. "At least it's cheap. I can't afford – what was it you said? So many jewels you can't stand up under the weight."

"Dear, please try," Wynne was saying to Sundancer, who stubbornly clutched two of her infants to her chest while the same black-haired women held the third asleep in her arms. She shook her head.

"I'll take one," Swiftrunner offered, taking one of the boys. "You need a free hand. Now eat."

"Try the yogurt, it's still quite fresh," Wynne suggested, pushing the bowl towards her. She grimaced, trying a bite only to spit it out and burst into tears.

"I'm sorry, I'm so tired," she sobbed. The babies woke up and started wailing.

Wynne and the two attendants persuaded her, bullying and cajoling in turns, to choke down some porridge and a few bites of cheese, before she had to stop and try to feed the infants who, of course, all got hungry at once and had to be fed _right now_.

"Why do humans have only two breasts?" she demanded almost hysterically.

Morrigan materialized at my elbow and told me grimly, "We had best make for the Crossing with all speed and obtain a milk goat. Assuming you would rather she not starve herself trying to feed them."

We made good time on the way back, but would still need another half-day to get out of the forest and then perhaps two days' travel on the road, depending on how well the newly-bipedal Tribe could manage. So when we camped that night, my "Warden Pack" gathered to discuss what we could do in the meantime to help the Tribe get ready for Orayan's Crossing.

A quiet scuffle over food precedence suddenly exploded into shouts and hoots as, with a sound like throwing a roast chicken at a wall, a tribesman punched an insubordinate male in the face, knocking the man out while simultaneously breaking his hand with a loud _crunch_. Sundancer's black-haired attendant gasped and ran to the man with the broken hand, who stared at the injury with a baffled expression, and began to fuss over him and try to pull him over to Morrigan. He shook her off and shoved the downed man aside to retrieve the contested sack of jerky from beneath his limp body.

The woman ran to Morrigan on her own, crouching on the ground before her and begging the use of her "magic stuff." Morrigan gave a put-upon sigh and heaved herself up, crossing to hold out the elfroot ointment and, when he mulishly refused it, to make pointed remarks about "males too foolish to make a proper fist" until he took it just to shut her up.

Meanwhile, Sundancer's black-haired attendant introduced herself as Nightsong and told me, in an awed whisper, of how Morrigan had hunted for them by magic and shapeshifting. "And then she turned the deer into ice, and Firetooth – that's him she's healing – he hit it with a log, and it broke! Oh, Sundancer's looking for me, I have to go, sorry!" And ran away again.

"I would appreciate it if you'd share your experience with them," I told Morrigan over my biscuits and honey once she'd returned. "You know best what it'll be like for them, their first time in a town."

"Fine," she said shortly. I'd expected more complaints from her, but when she stood and crossed to one of the larger gatherings of tribesmen and they all fell silent and attentive, I smiled at how she stood extra-straight and tossed her hair back from her face before beginning to lecture them on how to shake hands. Evidently she had earned some respect, and enjoyed it.

"It must be nice for her to be the knowledgeable one," Leliana commented, voicing my own thoughts.

"Yeah," I agreed. "We should make her our official liaison with them or something. Give her a title to use. They seem to respect official titles."

"I still can't believe they think I'm alpha," Alistair grumbled.

"Well, Zevran certainly isn't, and that just leaves you," I pointed out. "No offense, Zevran."

"None taken." He toyed with one of his slender Crow daggers, idly testing its blade against a fingernail. "The one who broke his hand – Firefang, yes?"

"Firetooth," Leliana corrected.

"Close enough. At any rate, it has occurred to me that we might have trouble on the road and we cannot have the entire Tribe breaking their fingers and trying to bite." He chuckled at the mental image. "Imagine if we encounter darkspawn and the whole tribe dies of the blood in their mouths?"

"We don't have any weapons for them," I said. "Except dinner knives, and only a couple of those."

"True. But we can at least show them how to throw a punch, no? And perhaps some of your Leske's brawling? In the Crossing, we can try to buy them some better equipment."

"With what money?" I asked sharply.

He raised an eyebrow at me, before going and politely asking a surly guard for permission to take a bag from the small pile of belongings the pack had brought with them. He brought it over and opened it, revealing an incredibly ornate helmet, worked with a pattern of leaves so exquisite, every vein and insect nibble was clearly visible in the ancient viridium.

"The pack brought its treasure," he said, showing his teeth in a mercenary smile. "I am sure your Bodahn can find us a good price, enough to buy weapons and armor for all their fighters and a good deal more besides."

"Ooh, this is _nice_," I breathed, picking it up and turning it over. "It's almost a shame to sell it. It must be elven. It's certainly not dwarven."

"You know, humans make things, too," Alistair said mildly.

"Humans made _you_," I batted my eyelashes at him. "But they make crap armor, everyone knows that. Someday we will get you into something better, something that doesn't show off three inches of your armpit whenever you raise your shield. And don't get me started about the backs of your knees."

"Hey," he protested, "this is my Gray Warden armor! And it's not like anyone _else_ is looking at my knees, you know."

"Is that a crack about my height?" I demanded.

"Oh, no, I would never," he said earnestly, all wide-eyed innocence. "Thank you for being so concerned about me. That's really _big_ of you."

"She has a point," Zevran cut in, grinning evilly, before I could retort. "Humans excel most of all in the production of other humans."

"Thank goodness we have you to help with all the excess population," Alistair grinned back at him.

The assassin smirked, polishing his fingernails on his leathers in false modesty. "I do my best. I'm quite selfless that way, actually."

The next day, we made it out onto the open road in time for lunch. The boots the elves had given us were worn and well-used, and what had probably been intended as a subtle insult had actually been a boon, since none of the pack were having trouble with blisters. We stopped for lunch in the cleared space at the side of the road, and Zevran and Alistair took the opportunity to discuss fighting with Swiftrunner, Gatekeeper and Firetooth after they had finished their meal – they always ate first, and in that order. I watched, ready to advise if necessary, but we'd agreed that the poor men would never get over it if they got their arse handed to them by a woman.

"I want a sword," Firetooth interrupted, pointing at Alistair's. "Is that the biggest they make?"

"I wouldn't recommend that, actually," Zevran interjected smoothly, drawing his own daggers. "You see, our large friend has been practicing with that rather ungainly penile metaphor for most of his life. You and yours, however, have fought with claws. Do you really want to start over from scratch in a vain attempt to imitate him, or would you rather keep your hard-earned expertise and fight with claws of steel?"

Phew, he really pulled out all the stops on that one. Firetooth bristled and eyed Zevran's daggers, then looked him up and down as though deciding whether he outranked him and could try to take them.

"I don't advise it, my friend," Swiftrunner murmured, laying a hand on his man's shoulder. The smaller man settled down, and I was struck by the difference in their size – I actually hadn't even thought of Firetooth as smaller until just now. The man radiated controlled violence in a sort of aura that made him fill up all available space, regardless of his actual size.

Then his eyes flicked over my shoulder. He drew himself up and turned back to Zevran and Alistair, jaw set. "All right. Teach me – _us_. Let's go, come on!"

Alistair held a sack of flour for them to punch and I left them to it for now, looking behind me to see what had inspired Firetooth. Nightsong lurked at the edge of the road, watching. When I caught her eye, she blushed prettily and lowered her gaze.

The men managed to get a pretty good handle on falling without getting hurt, and made some headway on the redirection move I'd taught Zevran, before it was time to move out again. Gatekeeper and Swiftrunner seemed especially interested in learning more of the Carta's method of controlling a fistfight, no doubt planning to use it as it was intended – to enforce discipline with a minimum of damage to valuable resources. No sense in breaking your best pickpocket's leg and rendering him useless to you for the next six weeks while it healed, not when you could just as easily pin him down until he came to his senses. They walked with heads together the rest of the day, discussing it, while Firetooth chattered excitedly to his friend, a lean, nondescript man, about what kinds of weapons they might buy.

"And then you put the milk in a bottle with a soft tip, and the babies drink it," Leliana's voice came from behind me and I slowed down to walk with her. She was holding one of the babies, Sundancer and Nightsong holding the other two and wearing the slightly dazed expression common among victims of Leliana's charm. The woman had a way of informing people that they were her friends now, with such conviction that they were left wondering what they'd missed.

"Also," she continued without breath, "we can have a hot bath and that will be really good for you and the babies. And we can wash our hair. Your hair is so pretty - so is yours, Nightsong. And we can go shopping for some clothes that fit you better, and slings for the babies so you can carry them more easily. And-"

"Will there be nicer shoes?" Nightsong interrupted eagerly, and I almost laughed at Leliana's rapturous expression when she realized she finally had someone who appreciated the finer things in life.

But we'd lost enough time with the informal training session that we didn't quite make it back to town before Alistair pointed out that, considering how long it took to feed the Tribe, we ought to start setting up camp or we'd be up all night long.

"All right," I sighed, and tried not to sulk over another night out-of-doors without the excellent comfort of the Bear's Den Inn.

"I'll just go and start everyone's fires, shall I?" he offered. I nodded, and he laid a hand on my shoulder and gave me a private smile before striding off to arrange things with Gatekeeper.

"Thank the ancestors someone here has a clue about large groups on the march," I said, mostly to myself, but Wynne was standing nearby and she came over to sit beside me when I started peeling potatoes for dinner.

"I am sorry for forcing things the other night, but I felt it important that you know," she apologized, almost absently waving a hand at the ground to force open a deep fire pit and pull up a flat stone for cooking on. I bit back my anger at her breaking her promise to leave the stone alone, because I wanted something from her.

I'd decided we couldn't afford for Wynne to be the only healer. Elfroot was all well and good, and Morrigan and her vicious streak would always be my first choice as battlemage, but only bare luck had prevented any of us from sustaining injuries beyond her ability to cure while in the forest. Wynne had said her healing was part talent and part skill. Perhaps Morrigan would never achieve her level of mastery, but she could at least be taught a little. But first, I had to convince Wynne to teach her.

So instead I shrugged and said, "It's okay. You were right." Everyone likes being told they're right.

She eyed me speculatively and asked, "Do you know much about the Wardens of old?"

I grinned at her, neglecting my half-peeled potato for the moment in favor of trying to be cute. "Yes! Alistair told me we had griffins!"

She smiled indulgently, and then said seriously, "There's that, of course, but there's a bit more to being a Gray Warden. Ultimately, it is about serving others."

"I kind of got that, actually," I said and turned back to my potato until the bitter twist was gone from my lip. Duncan and his entire company had _served_ with their very lives. "I think we're a little like the Legion of the Dead. Willing sacrifices to help keep the darkspawn at bay. At least, it helps to think of it that way. You know, I would have died if Duncan hadn't recruited me, so every day I live is just gravy."

"I did not know that."

She was watching me carefully and I looked up to give her another smile, to let her know I wasn't sulking or brooding or anything. "I mean it. It's not like dusters have much of a lifespan anyway, or much opportunity to do anything useful."

"Someone told me a story about the Wardens once, long ago. Would you like to hear it?" she offered.

"Only if it has griffins in it," I teased, nudging her with my elbow and grinning again.

To my surprise, she snorted and pulled away. "Again with the griffins? Honestly, it's like speaking with a child!"

Hurt, I felt my jaw tighten at what felt very much like a rejection. I said with brittle cheer, "Well, I wish I had a griffin."

"Griffins? Are we talking about griffins?" Alistair said with enthusiasm from over my shoulder. He scooped up the pot, now full of potatoes ready for cooking. "Arl Eamon gave me a griffin doll once. I kept it for years until one of the Mabari ate it."

"The two of you are quite a pair," Wynne commented dryly, and that was enough.

"Save the story for some other time, maybe," I said abruptly and followed Alistair to fill the pot with water from the jolly river a short ways downhill from the road.

Helping ladle water into the huge pot, I burst out, "Alistair, she moved the stone!"

"You've got the stone again? I mean, now that we're not in the forest?" he asked curiously.

I blinked. "Yes. I hadn't even noticed. It was so gradual." I breathed deeply in relief. "She dug up rocks by magic."

"She probably thought it wasn't a big deal. Was it?"

"...No. I guess not." I sighed again and sat at the edge of the shallow river. "She just – out of everyone here, including that pack of misogynists, she's the only one who makes me feel like a stupid girl. We didn't _ask_ to be the last Gray Wardens in the nation! This isn't even _my_ nation! I'm a dwarf! And she's lecturing me about serving others? When have I done _anything_ other than my job? What did I do to deserve being called a _child_?"

All the feelings of frustration and inadequacy that had built up the past few days came spilling out in a tirade that wasn't quite fair, really. But Alistair and Leliana and Zevran and even Morrigan all worked _with_ me, even if they sometimes disagreed, and I felt like we trusted each other. Wynne acted like she didn't trust me to tie my own boots.

"Nothing," Alistair said, sitting heavily on the gravel beside me. "You've been amazing."

"You've done everything I've done. If you weren't here, I would still be sitting in the Korcari Wilds, hiding from the rain."

"You know, I was just thinking the same thing," he said with a smile.

I laughed at the image of mighty warrior Alistair cowering under a bush, and let myself lean on him, feeling soft and vulnerable in the wake of my tantrum. He touched my chin; when I looked up at him he cupped my cheek in his hand and gave me a searching look. I waited in breathless anticipation until I figured out _he_ was waiting for _me_, being a perfect gentleman – or maybe afraid I would fly away like a frightened bird if he startled me.

Well, no worries there – I _like_ kisses, _especially_ from Alistair, who threw himself into the art with the same single-minded dedication as he did Gray Wardening and smiting evil mages. I threw my arms around his neck and practically tackled him; he fell back on his elbows and laughed, a brilliant sound, and his smile felt lovely.

Too soon, much too soon, the complaining from the rest of the camp wondering where the potatoes had gone grew loud enough that we had to get up and finish our task and pretend we had been perfectly dutiful and not distracted at all, biting our lips to keep from grinning, which would have been a dead giveaway. The rest of the night passed uneventfully and breakfast went more smoothly than usual, the Tribe getting into the swing of things and no longer needing to re-establish their hierarchy at every meal.

So we were on our way only a few hours after dawn, when the air began to feel dank and oppressive. I shook my head and rubbed at my eyes, hoping I was just slow to wake up. It didn't help, and I was about to try getting a drink of water when Alistair hissed through his teeth and grabbed my wrist.

"You're feeling that?" he asked darkly.

"Is it weather?" I asked, frowning at the blue sky.

"It's darkspawn," he spat and pulled his shield down off his back, thrusting his arm through its straps. "Get ready. I think they're attacking the town."

* * *

_Thanks to everyone and their incredibly supportive reviews! And thank you for bearing with me during these transitional chapters. I'm hoping things will get more exciting now._


	39. Orayan's Entree

"Darkspawn?" "Darkspawn!"

The cry went all down the line, the Wolf Tribe knotting themselves up into a clump as I called over my shoulder for Zevran and Morrigan to follow us, Leliana and Wynne to stay with the women and children. I heard Leliana arguing loudly with Swiftrunner, telling him he had to keep the pack together and away from the tainted creatures.

"How far away are they?" I asked Alistair, bouncing on my toes in nervous impatience as he paused to take off his backpacks and set them down neatly. I jerked my own off and flung it away, then sent my hat spinning after it, deciding it restricted my vision too much.

"I – I'm not really sure," Alistair was saying, as I blinked in the astonishingly bright sunlight and waited for my eyes to adjust. "I used to only be able to sense them maybe a quarter of a mile away except for the actual Horde. But that was weeks ago so maybe it's farther?"

He broke into an easy jog and we followed, Rocky loping along in our wake, tongue lolling out in happy anticipation. Alistair set us a frustratingly sustainable pace when Rocky and I would have run, holding me by the arm and warning me to "save some energy for the darkspawn or they'll be terribly disappointed." My skin began to crawl unpleasantly as we neared, the sensation of prickling heat reminiscent of sparks off the Dust Town lava.

The forest finally gave way to the pastures and corrals used for trading livestock, spread out in a wide circle around the town, which hunkered in the center at the intersection of the two local highways. The broken remains of a herd of cattle lay scattered across the ground, blood soaked into the earth and churned into mud beneath the gaping rib cages and staring skulls. To our left, a campfire was spilling black, oily smoke from within a band of perhaps a dozen darkspawn scrambling to gear up and face their hated enemy.

Overturned wagons blocked the entrances to Orayan's trading grounds and the spaces between buildings, all the outward-facing windows boarded up. Steel-tipped crossbow bolts protruded from every chink in the boards and over the tops of the wagons, and a lookout inside the town shouted, "The Gray Wardens! It's the Gray Wardens!"

"All two of them," Alistair muttered grimly and drew his sword. Zevran flicked his daggers into his hands, his calm facade betrayed when he began to twirl them nervously. It occurred to me then that Zevran might not have seen darkspawn before.

"Zev," I told him, "You guard Morrigan, okay? Morrigan, you kill darkspawn. Remember the blood is poison."

"They do not bleed when frozen solid," she said with a feral grin, flakes of ice beginning to form directly out of the air around her hands. Then she suddenly stiffened, shimmering bands of force forming in the air around her and leaving her paralyzed in an expression of surprise.

"Emissary! An emissary!" Alistair shouted and charged the darkspawn camp. I swore and started to follow, spotting his target standing in the center of a gathering cloud of shadow. The darkspawn fighters finally had their act together and moved to protect him.

I ran in Alistair's wake, gesturing urgently to our faster four-legged Warden, pointing him at our target. "Rocky! Take him down!" I ordered, hoping he could reach the emissary before it released its next spell.

The dog shot across the blood-soaked field, darting between darkspawn until he made a mighty leap over the last defender's desperately raised shield and hit the mage in the chest, bearing him down to the mud with a sodden thump. The cloud dissipated immediately as the emissary's chanting broke off into a shriek.

The darkspawn fighters scrambled to protect – or avenge – their mage, whirling and running back to his side with Alistair and me in hot pursuit. They converged on Rocky as he tore himself free of the bloodied corpse, and my heart pounded with fear for him as he snarled defiance.

Alistair threw himself behind his shield and plowed into their ring of blackened steel, knocking one down and thrusting two others aside until he could cover the dog's vulnerable flank. I slaughtered the glenlock on the ground before it could regain its feet and then darted back, circling behind the creatures to deliver as much damage as possible before they broke out of their cramped formation to face me properly.

All was chaos, the leaderless pack raging around Alistair's steady defenses and mostly getting in each other's way. I slashed the back of the closest knee on my way to a better target, sinking both daggers into a wide rent in another's tattered chainmail; it crumpled with a satisfying gurgle and I was already moving on, using both hands to drive a blade into the narrow opening beneath an ill-fitting helmet. Alistair lashed out with his shield, knocking another glenlock into my waiting embrace. I slit its throat and let it fall, matching Alistair's fierce grin over its crumpling form.

We'd opened a sizable gap in the disorganized ring of darkspawn now, and before they filled it in again, Rocky exploded out through the hole and Alistair followed, turning on his heel to face the remaining darkspawn and drawing them after him so they formed a tight clump _just_ in time for Morrigan arrive and blast the whole neat row of them into ugly ice statues.

"Welcome back," I shouted to her over the crashing of Alistair gleefully bashing the frozen darkspawn to bits. "You okay?"

"That was most unpleasant," she scowled. "I suggest in the future your Templar perform his duty more promptly."

"That was truly a sight to behold," Zevran said, and kicked a chunk of darkspawn over curiously.

Alistair looked up from the glistening pile of darkspawn bits and gave me a broad smile. I pumped my fist in the air and cried, "Go Team Warden!" Which was a little silly, and more than a little premature.

A furious howl rose up from the east road and we all looked sharply in its direction. A returning darkspawn raiding party was bearing down on us with murder in their mad eyes. Too many, _far_ too many for us to fight – we ought to have known this one small group would have backup around somewhere.

"Oh, Maker," Alistair whispered.

"To the town!" I grabbed his hand and Rocky's collar, dragging them the first few steps until they followed. We raced towards the barricade, the men on the other side calling and waving, bellowing for us to "just bring the beasts in range o' the bows and we'll give them a taste of Fereldan steel!"

"Fire!"

A rattle of bowstrings, a hiss like swarming bees, and the sweet, sweet sound of crossbow bolts hitting flesh. I spared a glance over my shoulder and saw a few stagger and fall, dead with lucky shots to the face or throat, but the rest ignored even mortal wounds and only howled the louder. The men on the barricade began furiously working to reload their crossbows but we were out of room and spun around to face the onslaught, our backs to the wall.

"We just gotta wait for them to die," I panted.

"This part takes forever!" Alistair said breezily, and stepped forward to catch a clumsy axe on his shield, throwing it past him and impaling its wielder on his sword. Zevran put another one down, Rocky growled ferociously, and I was braced to meet my own attacker when Morrigan flicked her hands and her mind spell swept over them all.

Without exception, the entire group swayed and fell. Most did not rise again, the sheer rage that had kept them alive draining away into the dirt with their blood. Those that did stagger upright again tasted some more "Fereldan steel" and also some dwarven, if I got to them first. Zevran stepped between the fallen darkspawn with an air of professional thoroughness, slitting every last throat, "Just to be neat about it, you see."

"I told them, I told everyone, 'Just you hang on and the Gray Wardens will come!'"

I looked over my shoulder and saw Bodahn's beaming face as he clambered up on top of the barricade, his own heavy crossbow in his hands. I grinned at him and jumped up to touch his hand, too short to actually shake it. "I hope you didn't have too hard a time of it?" I asked as the men behind him began to organize themselves to pull apart the barricades.

"Oh, not too bad," he said in what I suspected was excessive good cheer. "We got ourselves inside while they were a-feasting and set up this nice wall you see here." He patted the wagon affectionately. "Most of the caravans have a few guards, and of course there's the weaponsmith. And on the third day the local bann made a break for it and managed to get inside with his soldiers. Those are the burly lads you hear working on the deconstruction."

"Why didn't the critters just leave?" I asked with a frown. Darkspawn weren't notable for their patience, and a protracted siege wasn't normal.

"I expect it's the surviving cattle," he admitted. "The drovers got more than half their herd in while the dumb brutes were distracted eating, and they've hung around ever since like a dog staring at his master's plate. 'Course, that means we've been sharing our beds with the cows. It's getting a bit ripe in here, if you catch my meaning."

I laughed at the image. "Poor fellows. Do me a favor, will you? Tell-"

"Anything!" he cried.

"Right. Tell the bann we have a band of refugees. They're a tribe from the Brecilian Forest and none too familiar with civilization, so he might want us to bed down in a stable or some such. Tell him we need room and board for fifty."

"Certainly!" He scurried down the far side of the barricade and I heard him trotting off.

"Enchantment," came a very satisfied whisper from near my waist, and I bent down to see Sandal peeking through a chink between wagons and holding an extremely vicious-looking crossbow, etched all over in glowing runes. He caught my eye and grinned, then ran off after his father.

"If you have finished congratulating yourself, may I suggest you attend to your dog," Morrigan said cuttingly, and I spun to see her hovering over Rocky, the dog slumped down to the ground and trying feebly to lick at his side where a darkspawn blade had bit deep.

"Oh!" I cried, ashamed and horrified in equal measure. I snatched the tub of ointment from Morrigan, who backed away quickly from the tainted blood that coated his fur. "Don't lick that – lie down, there, that's a good dog. Yes..."

"Poor Rocky!" Alistair fell to his knees and started to fuss over the dog, taking his head in his hands. "Poor hurt doggy, I'm sorry-"

"You're making him more upset, tell him what a good brave boy he is instead," I interrupted when Rocky began to cry and beg for petting. "He's not a poor doggy, he's a fierce warhound! Yes he is. He killed an emissary, yes he did!"

Rocky gave me a slightly offended look, as though wishing he could have milked Alistair's pity a while longer and maybe gotten some food out of it, but it was too late. Alistair steeled himself and switched to rubbing his ears and praising him heartily, and Rocky sighed and submitted to my ministrations with good grace.

"The Tribe is here," Zevran said after several minutes, when I was finishing examining Rocky all over to make sure I hadn't missed anything. The wounds were deep, but the elfroot worked quickly and I felt confident he would be up and about in no time.

"Evidently they cannot even _sit_ and _stay_ on command," Morrigan said dryly.

"We have to keep them away from the bodies," I said and got to my feet, offering Alistair a hand up. "What do we do with them, anyway? How long are they dangerous? Forever?"

"A couple days," he replied. "That's why we have to get fresh blood for the ritual, it doesn't keep very long."

"Wardens?" The barricade had been gradually turning back into wagons and furniture, and now a rather dumpy man in bright blue brocade walked briskly out through the opening. He wore a particularly dapper hat, and I eyed its peacock feather enviously as yet another very expensive import in Orzammar.

"My lord Bann, I assume?" I pulled off my filthy glove and held out my hand. "I'm Latitia and this is Alistair, helpful Gray Wardens."

He tittered nervously and shook my hand, his a bit clammy and soft. I guessed that he, lord of a merchant's town, was more used to wielding a pen than a sword. "Yes, I am Bann Lloyd Entorell. On behalf of my town, let me offer my gratitude and hospitality. I hear you have refugees?"

"Yes, them," I gestured behind me to the approaching pack, its members skirting around the bloody corpses under guidance from Zevran. "Also, please tell your people not to touch the darkspawn or their blood for several days. It's poison."

"We know, that's why we've been hunkered down in here," he said. "Your friend told us all we should keep clear of the beasts, vouched for you and promised you would come soon and take care of it for us. I knew Teyrn Loghain was wrong about the Wardens, it just made no sense that they were traitors."

"It's what we do," Alistair agreed blandly. "Take care of people's annoying little darkspawn problems. They're such pests."

"Also demons and werewolves and undead," I reminded him, and he grinned. Bann Entorell watched, looking a bit lost, as our mutual grins gradually turned goofy and calf-eyed, and eventually he edged past us and began talking to Zevran and Gatekeeper about where the pack could bed down for the night.

"That was awesome!" I burst out finally, all terror forgotten in the wake of adrenaline and a definite win. I buzzed with energy, now, a familiar feeling and one that had gotten me thrown in the cells overnight once for being "definitely high on something."

"Yes!" he cried, waving his shield around as though smashing an invisible glenlock. Evidently my reaction wasn't unique. "I love how I can just knock one over and I _know_ it's as good as dead because you're there with your knife-"

"And I love how you're all in the thick of it like a – like an anchor, and you go _rraaah_ and darkspawn go flying!"

Rocky barked.

"And such a speedy dog we have!" I hugged his head against my chest, barely even needing to bend over. He grunted and I softened my grip a bit. "Yes he's a speedy dog. Yes he is. He's a great big fuzzy ballista bolt, oh yes. And Morrigan is awesome." I raised my voice to holler at her across the field. "Morrigan is awesome! She's an ice sculptress!"

She raised an eyebrow at me, then dismissed me with a wave of her hand as too ridiculous to be worth her attention. I laughed.

We employed the Wolf Tribe in cleaning out the bann's stables to prepare them for temporary human habitation. Then we gulped down some lunch and spent the afternoon helping to put the market back together again. Well, most of us did. Alistair and I had the unenviable task of dragging darkspawn bodies into a pile away from the town, for eventual burial.

"They're just as ugly when they're dead," I noted, pausing to wipe sweat off my forehead.

"I don't know, I think death really suits them," he said and heaved another body into a wheelbarrow. "They look peaceful. In a nasty, rotting, evil sort of way."

The local farmers seized the opportunity to run out to fetch some produce, and charged an absurd rate for it that night for dinner. But the trapped soldiers and merchants paid it gladly, flush with victory and survival, and the Bear's Den innkeeper wouldn't hear of us paying for a thing when we went in for a snack and a wash. I was just polishing off a bowl of blueberries and cream (with much _ooh_-ing and _aah_-ing and other indecent sounds of delight that made Morrigan scoff and roll her eyes again) when a girl in a neatly pressed blue dress ducked into the inn and scurried over to our table.

"Milord, Bann Entorell bids me invite you and your party to his table for dinner," she said breathlessly, dropping a quick curtsy for Alistair.

Alistair, for his part, squirmed at her formality and a blush started to creep up his cheeks. He glanced to me for input and I almost said _no_ – Dinner with a bann? Wearing what, my darkspawn-bloodied armor? Nibbling on fancy tidbits instead of the delicious-smelling pig currently roasting on a spit in the inn's ovens?

But then what would Entorell think, if we so rudely refused a personal invitation? We needed allies. I grimaced, but steeled myself and said, "We'd love to. But he'll have to understand we're traveling, and don't have anything fancy to wear."

She brightened and opened her mouth, and I noticed she and I were almost the same size and gave her a look that said _Do not even consider lending me a dress. _She stopped and blushed, and I felt a little guilty for glaring at her. But not guilty enough to wear a skirt. She nodded instead and scooted off to report to her lord.

"It might be nice, you might like it," Alistair said tentatively, looking at my face.

I realized I was glowering and stopped, picking up my bowl to sip the last of the cream. "I suppose. I'm just, I mean, I'm not exactly used to polite company."

"Oh? What am I, then, some alley thug?" Zevran sniffed, slipping into a chair beside me with a buttered roll.

"Zev, I don't doubt that you could saunter into any ball in Thedas and instantly your leathers would be the height of fashion," I sighed. "But some of us grew up in a hole in the ground, and not even in the nice part of the hole. Think _slum_, and then fill it with lava, and surround it with darkspawn, and you've got an idea of it."

"I thought you liked Orzammar," Alistair said with a puzzled frown.

"Oh, I do. Did you know Dust Town used to be a palace? Before the nobles decided to move to the Diamond Quarter. That's why we have the nice baths and stuff." I smiled at the way he pursed his lips, imagining a great dwarven palace abandoned and colonized by the people who once would not even have been allowed to mop its floors.

"Besides," I continued, "It's _my_ hole in the ground. I can make fun of it if I want to."

The men chuckled, and we dragged ourselves out of the dining room to leave our armor in our rooms. We collected Wynne and Leliana and left, not bothering to look for Morrigan because frankly, none of us trusted her to eat with a knife and fork, much less make civilized dinner conversation.

The Bann's estate was a completely indefensible manor house, with no keep, no moat and no walls (unless you count the ornamental hedge), and tall mullioned windows that said, "I'm one club away from being a door!" No wonder the man had taken his people and fled for the barricaded marketplace for shelter. A uniformed footman met us at the door and ushered us to the dining room, opulently paneled in more of the dark, richly grained Brecilian wood.

Bann Entorell bustled over to greet us, enthusing again over our skill and introducing us to the other members of his family. He had a plump wife, like a cupcake in her pink gown, and a little blond toddler who waved a spoon at us. There were also a couple of cousins, young women who eyed me like something stuck to their dainty shoes. They all had names, and I forgot them all immediately, because I realized the chairs were white.

_By Astyth's damned tongue, what the __**hell**__ do I do now_? I wondered desperately whether I should ask for a towel to sit on. There was no way those chairs would survive contact with my clothes and stay white. But Alistair, at least as filthy as me, eased into his own chair and began telling the Bann about our adventures in the Forest without any evidence of concern, so I gave up and plopped down on his other side. The cousin on my right subtly pulled her pale blue skirts a little further away from my boots, and soup materialized in front of everyone.

Zevran immediately bent his charm upon the haughty cousins, flashing me a triumphant smirk when he made them giggle and blush. Leliana and Wynne bonded with the Bann's cupcake wife and they took turns feeding bites of dinner to the toddler.

"We might not have been so hard-pressed, but Teyrn Loghain has been calling for reinforcements to his army ever since Ostagar," Entorell was saying to Alistair. I perked up my ears. "I hear parts of the bannorn are in revolt."

"I'm amazed anyone could follow Loghain," Alistair spat bitterly. "Do you know what he did at Ostagar? He left King Cailan and the Gray Wardens to die. We barely escaped with our lives. By rights, we should be dead on that field with everyone else."

The Bann paled visibly. "Goodman Bodahn told me as much, but... I had no idea the Teyrn could be capable of such a thing. Are you sure?"

"With my own eyes, I saw him turn his back on the King and run away," I put in.

He shook his head sadly. "I'm not a military man – you might have guessed," he waved at his elegant dining room and the gardens visible by lamplight through the window. "So when the Teyrn said he had to quit the field, I took his word for it. So have many other banns. But when darkspawn show up on my doorstep, well..."

"It's amazing how people change their minds about the Wardens once they actually see a darkspawn," Alistair said dryly. "Suddenly it's 'Save me, Wardens! I never liked that Loghain guy anyway!'"

The poor man flushed, and I had a thought. "Bann Entorell, you seem like a well-connected man, with all the caravans passing through here. We're trying to rally all the support we can against the Blight – yes," I added, seeing his eyes widen, "it really is a Blight. Anyone you can share your information with, who might be willing to help us, would be one more sword raised in defense of Thedas."

"And Ferelden, specifically," Alistair added. "We want to stop the Blight _here_. If we wait, it'll move north and swallow us whole."

Entorell nodded solemnly. The evening grew late, and by the time they were passing around a small bottle of port wine, I had given up on preserving the chair and was slumped against its back. Wynne glanced at me and said, "Well, I think it's almost time for these old bones to get to bed."

"I think the little one agrees," Cupcake-the-wife said. The toddler had fallen asleep in her lap.

So we made our farewells, insisted we were perfectly comfortable at the inn and did not need to move up to his place. We trailed in a line down the long drive to the highway, into the town and up to our rooms. I stopped at Alistair's door and hung around while he struggled with the uncooperative lock. It finally swung open and he started to step inside before he noticed me standing there looking lost.

"Something wrong?" he asked, touching my cheek.

I ducked under his arm and leaned on his chest. "I had a long day and I need a hug."

"Got it." He enfolded me in his arms and for a moment I just stood and soaked up comfort.

"Dinner was exhausting. Entorell is so _fancy,_" I said eventually. "He's nice, really, but..."

"You hate fancy, I know," he laughed a little and rubbed a hand up and down my back. I sighed and felt some of the tension unwind in my shoulders. "And of course, before that there were darkspawn."

"Ugh, yes. It's amazing how ten minutes of battle is more tiring than ten hours of walking." I shivered a little at the memory of dozens of darkspawn, the awful flight to the barricade's shelter, and tightened my arms around Alistair's waist. "And then we had to lug the brutes around afterward. Even when they're dead, they're still inconvenient!"

"On the plus side," Alistair pointed out, "we will get a great price on that gear tomorrow."

"Selling _and_ buying," I laughed, and reluctantly let go and started to my room. "Thanks for the hug. I'll leave you alone now."

"Wait-" He caught my arm and bent down to steal a kiss. "There, now you can go."

* * *

_Ohhh-kay. Sorry I'm late, my mother's in town and I've been running around like the proverbial headless chicken. I'm not entirely sure when the next chapter will be finished; I have zero free time until my mother goes home next week, so there might be a longer wait than usual. In other words: Don't worry, I haven't been run over by a train, I'm just visiting family :)_

_Many thanks to everyone for their patience and support. I had no idea The Internet had such nice people in it. Clearly I have been hanging around on the wrong websites!_


	40. Outside Denerim

_Special thanks to mille libri and Nithu for beta duty and hand-holding!_

_More about Swiftrunner's pack here (remove the spaces): fanfiction . net/s/6153443/1/Wolf_Whistles _

* * *

"Now pull that strap through the buckle – no, not that way – _no_! Pull your trousers up _this instant_!"

Morrigan continued haranguing the flustered ex-werewolf until he finally had his new leather armor on properly, an amusing element to the background noise of Bann Entorell's stable yard. Only the most average-sized werew – sorry, _tribesmen_ had armor so far; Orayan's Crossing had plenty of stock suits of hardened leather, but the armoror had been killed defending the barricade. That left us with at least twenty suits of leathers that I planned on adjusting myself, with Bodahn's harness tools and a bit of ingenuity.

I was leaning on Bodahn's wagon and gnawing on some of the freshly-baked hardtack when Gatekeeper approached, looking serious as always. "I believe we are ready to go," he said. "Everyone has their items packed and on their backs, as Warden Alistair instructed."

"I'll tell Bodahn, and we'll head out." I pushed myself upright, handing the rest of my biscuit to the nanny-goat tied to the rear of the wagon. She munched on it pensively. "You be sure and make lots of milk, nanny," I told her. "Sundancer needs a break. Speaking of which, Gatekeeper, she's welcome to ride in the wagon."

He nodded. "Bodahn already offered. He only asked for three sovereigns, which sounded like a good price."

"He _charged_-" I started to exclaim, but stopped myself with a private grin at the dwarf's business acumen. He wasn't running a charity, after all. "Right. Okay. Let's go, then."

And so we rolled out of Entorell's estate, the Wolf Tribe trailing along behind us and the goat occasionally offering her opinion, generally disapproving of having to bypass all this nice grass. I picked handfuls for her as we went.

Nightsong spent a lot of her time beside the wagon to help with the babies. The women had bought dresses; Leliana gushed over them and told them how pretty they were and taught them how to care for their hair. The bard was truly in her element.

The week's journey was shockingly uneventful. I had begun to expect every possible horrible thing to go wrong at all times, and couldn't believe my luck as I walked along a well-kept road, listening to Leliana's happy chatter and seizing any moment of privacy to make out with Alistair.

As we approached Denerim, the land became more and more crowded, shifting gradually from wheat and cattle farms to higher-profit produce, farmland close to the city and its hungry market being in great demand. Our group of armed and armored men attracted more attention, too.

On the sixth day, the land began to slope upwards, and on the seventh, the great Mount Drakon reared up on the horizon. We crested a foothill and all at once the city of Denerim lay before us, hunkered against the mountainside with its arms spread protectively around its harbor. Its _harbor_! I couldn't see much of it from here, but it sparkled.

"We should find a place for the wolves to stay," Alistair said, coming up behind me as I ogled the shiny strip of ocean in the distance. "We're not taking them into the city, right?"

"Yeah, I don't think that's a good idea," I agreed. "Can we rent someone's stable?"

"I don't know, but if we pose as refugees, we might. Gold speaks pretty loudly." He rubbed his chin for a moment. "But I'm worried about people thinking we're a Gray Warden army, or deserters or something."

"All right," I decided. "We'll stick all our weapons in Bodahn's cart, and if you give me one of your tunics I bet I can turn it into a surcoat like what Teagan wears. No sleeves, but it'd cover your Warden crest. I doubt anyone will recognize me, I'm too scruffy to look like a threat to the throne."

"You're not scruffy-"

"Yes, I am. Get me a tunic."

I cut off the sleeves and slit the side seams open, then tossed it over his head and belted it around his waist. "There," I said. "Now you're scruffy, too. The rest of your armor is so battered, nobody will believe you're anything but a worn-out mercenary."

We approached a relatively small farm about two hours' walk from the city, thinking that a farmer at a disadvantage would be more willing to accept our gold. The man was just sitting down to his supper and greeted us with suspicion, looking over my head at the neat rows of men and the covered wagon. I jingled our purse suggestively while Alistair recited the story we had worked out together; the man barely listened, his eyes following the movement of the purse.

"Fine," he said. "You can use my sheep barn. The sheep are all at pasture, so it's empty. I want you all in there by sunset, and anyone comes near the house at night, I'll shoot them. I'm not having any of you murdering my family in our sleep."

"We would _never_ murder your family in their sleep!" Alistair protested.

I nudged him with an elbow to silence him and told the man, "Whatever will let you feel secure, Ser. Thank you very much for your generosity."

We decided to spend the night here and go into the town first thing in the morning rather than wander about the streets in the dark, and I used the time to make some serious headway on finishing the last sets of armor. I'd always had to fix up my own armor, standard dwarven leathers being made for women with actual curves, so I wasn't entirely new to the task, but still, the work went slowly.

The "Ruling Council" of the wolf tribe had, of course, been first to get their new armor and daggers, and picked up skill very quickly as Zevran proved a competent teacher, modifying techniques for them to use the blades like claws. Zevran, Swiftrunner and Gatekeeper finished up and went for dinner, but the insatiable Firetooth asked Alistair for practice fighting a different kind of opponent. I kept finding myself sneaking glances in their direction despite the sharp tools in my hands.

"Hold your elbows closer to your body," Alistair instructed, then swung a slow but heavy blow at the smaller man's torso. Firetooth deflected the stroke more easily this time, grinning, and lunged to take advantage of Alistair's temporary imbalance.

"Nice," Alistair approved, but twisted and caught Firetooth full in the shoulder with the edge of his shield, staggering him; by the time he'd regained his balance, Alistair was set behind his shield again. Rapt, I accidentally stabbed myself in the thumb with an awl.

"Sod," I swore and stuck my bleeding thumb in my mouth, glaring at Morrigan when she sniggered. Her own lap was full of grasses, from which she was extracting some sort of seed.

"Stop playing around," Firetooth growled.

"Did I hurt you? I'm sorry, I'll slow down."

I looked up in alarm, hearing the undercurrent of real frustration and anger in Firetooth's voice and realizing he might take Alistair's offer as an insult. But they were just sparring – I could see Alistair's sword was wrapped securely, and Firetooth's daggers were in their sheaths. I turned my eyes back to my sewing and tried to ignore the growls and the scrape of steel on steel -

Wait, what?

"Ow! Andraste's flaming _arse_, man, what are you doing?"

I jumped up, sending tools rolling across the ground, and ran to Alistair; he half-sat, half-fell to the ground, dropping his sword to clench his arm against his side. Blood had already soaked through the padding and drippped down the plates of his armor. Firetooth bared his teeth in a triumphant grin, a naked blade in one hand gleaming red up to the hilt. I turned on him, but found myself utterly speechless with fury.

"I win," Firetooth said, grinning even wider.

I clenched my teeth for an instant, and then snatched up Alistair's discarded gauntlet, shoved my hand into it, and sucker-punched that smug arsehole square in the chin.

If Alistair had thrown that punch, it would have broken his jaw; as it was, he only staggered backwards with a grunt of pain. I jerked the dagger out of his hand and set its tip against his throat.

"Of all the cowardly, ungrateful, nug-humping..." I scrabbled for words strong enough to hurt him, my heart pounding so hard I could barely hear myself, and a heavy hand landed on my shoulder.

"I'll thank you to let me discipline my own men," Swiftrunner said quietly.

"Then discipline them!" I snapped, hurling the dagger away. "Get him out of my sight! He's not to come within ten paces of Alistair ever again or I swear by my ancestors I will gut him like a dog!"

"Tisha," Alistair mumbled, and I turned my back on the werewolves and knelt beside him to work open the buckles of his cuirass, blinking rapidly and biting my lips to stop them trembling. Morrigan appeared long enough to drop a tub of elfroot ointment in his lap and I threw the breastplate aside with a clatter, pulling off the lid with hands made slippery with blood. A hoarse, suppressed groan from Alistair and I pulled my small fingers out of the hole in his side, the bleeding already slowing as I clamped my hands over the wound to keep the ointment in.

"That man is a liability," I snarled while we waited for the flesh to knit. "Swiftrunner needs to muzzle his dog."

"He got me pretty good," Alistair admitted, his words slurred with pain. "I wasn't taking him seriously. Guess he showed me, huh?"

"They can fix their own sodding armor. And they can find their own sodding way to Redcliffe. Or go back to the sodding forest and roll around in the dirt like sodding animals-"

"Ha ha, you're so mad," he said, awkwardly slinging his arm around my shoulders, and kissed my furrowed brow. "It's cute."

"Why aren't you?" I demanded, letting go with one hand to stick a finger into his mouth, checking his gums for shock. They were healthy and pink and he batted my hand away.

"He thinks I'm an alpha, I'm guessing this was some sort of political thing." He shrugged lopsidedly, keeping the injured side still. "I forgot, it's not like they've ever been through any kind of military training."

"You're saying it's all right he stabbed you because he didn't know any better? By the Stone, you're too forgiving for your own good." I released him and sat back on my heels to glower at him, but my scowl faded at the sudden darkness that passed over his face.

"Some things are unforgivable," he said, and I knew he meant Loghain. Then he shook it off and added, "But a knife in the ribs? Noooo problem."

"Fine, _Alpha_. Have it your way. I won't have his kidneys for dinner, _this time_."

"Hopefully there won't be a next time, this wasn't fun. Speaking of dinner..." He started to get up, lost his balance and sat back down again. "On second thought, this ground is really comfortable."

"I'll bring you something," I said and trotted inside the barn, where some simple food had been set out for the werewolf pack.

I heaped a bowl with ham and some sort of stewed greens, stacking slices of bread on top of it and trembling. Nightsong trotted up to me and groveled, kneeling and trying to take my hand.

"Mistress Gray Warden Latitia," she began.

"Just Warden will do," I said shortly, tugged back my hand. "Get up, don't kneel like that before anyone but the King."

She stood, but hunched awkwardly, trying to keep her head lower than mine despite being a foot taller. "W-Warden," she stammered, "Please don't provoke my mate. If you fight him, you'll have to kill him." Her tone left little doubt as to whether she thought I would succeed. "He is under a lot of strain right now. Please forgive him. Swiftrunner has punished him, himself. There's no need to – I mean, of course you will do as you see fit, but-"

"I'm not going to eat him for dinner," I waved the hand that wasn't holding a full bowl at her. "Alistair isn't angry. But you need to..." I thought for a moment and had a brilliant idea. "You need to talk to Wynne. Ask her to explain the importace of obeying the law to your whole pack."

"Yes, Mis – um, Warden. Thank you." With that, she left.

I grabbed a full jug of water and brought it out to Alistair, the sight of him gingerly poking at the scabbed-over wound making my throat close up again. I put the bowl in his lap and sat down beside him while he ate, ravenous with healing magic.

"I'm okay, really," he said when his mouth was finally empty enough to talk. "Don't look so sad."

"I look sad?" I said blankly.

"Well, upset or whatever. Look, I'm not an expert on women's feelings." He took a long draught from his water, watching me sidelong.

"I'm not... I'm just coming down from being really angry and scared. Are you tired? Maybe you should have an early night." I stood up without waiting for his answer and held out my hand. He took it and made it to his feet this time.

I picked up the dirty dishes and followed him into the long barn down the end, where our own 'pack' had laid out our bedrolls near Bodahn's wagon, for no reason other than force of habit. I helped Alistair out of the rest of his armor and he settled himself under his blanket, rolling away from the firelight and closing his eyes.

I wasn't sleepy. All down the length of the barn, people were talking and arranging their bedding, and one of the baby boys was crying. Wynne approached our area and greeted me with a brief smile.

"I gave them a good talking-to," she said, speaking quietly to avoid disturbing Alistair. "Should I take a look at him?"

"If you think you should. I got elfroot in there pretty deep, but..." I shrugged disconsolately.

"I'm fine," Alistair mumbled.

"I'm going for a walk before bed," I said, deciding he would sleep better without me hovering. Rocky perked up from where he had been begging from a group of teenagers and padded over expectantly. "No," I shook my head. "You stay here, with Alistair." He sighed and plopped down beside him. After a moment Alistair squirmed over to use him as a pillow.

I slipped out the side door of the barn and wandered in a circle around it, mindful of the farmer's warning to stay away from his house. The farmer had a couple of Mabari and a fluffy black sheepdog, all of whom had arranged themselves on the lawn between us and their masters. The Mabari were neither as intelligent-looking nor as handsome as Rocky, at least not to me. Maybe I was biased.

I wasn't sure why Firetooth's treachery had struck me so deeply. Alistair had been hurt in battle many times, and what of his skin I had seen was laced with the fine-edged scars of wounds healed by elfroot. It was an occupational hazard, and one I had accepted.

But this hadn't been battle, I thought, repeating my circuit of the barn. This had been practice. Friendly. It should have been safe.

_Nowhere is safe_, my mind reminded me spitefully. _Nobody is safe_.

I passed a cunning sort of conveyer that I was pretty sure was used to bring hay up to the hayloft, and turned to walk up it, bored of circling the barn. The hayloft smelled sweet and slightly dusty, the sound from below muffled by the layers of bales. Alistair had a thing about haylofts, I remembered as I wandered into the darker recesses. He must like the smell.

A sudden burst of giggles and clattering footsteps, and I realized someone else was coming up here. I turned to see who, and Firetooth jumped into the hayloft, pulling Nightsong after him. I set my jaw and glanced around for some other way down, spotting a couple of windows but nothing convenient. I did _not_ want to talk to that man, especially not in front of his mate.

Well, it was very dark in here. They surely wouldn't see me, blind as humans are at night. I would wait until they were further from the entrance and then sneak out. I settled down on my haunches, letting my eyes go half-lidded to prevent them from gleaming in the dark, and waited.

He led Nightsong across to the soft, loose hay before drawing her close and kissing her softly. She murmured something to him that I tried very hard not to hear, a blush beginning to creep up my cheeks. His reply came too firmly for me to ignore, though, without covering my ears and humming, which would have made me rather conspicuous.

"Are you kidding? You're gorgeous. You're stunning. I can hardly think when you're around me."

He began tugging on the laces of her dress and I looked away. I heard the fabric fall softly to the hay, heard her giggle and sigh as he laid her down, and began to creep across to the exit. Almost there, I stepped on a twig buried in the hay and it snapped; I glanced at them quickly to see if they'd heard, and froze.

Nightsong lay nude and rapturous in the pale moonlight; her lover bent eagerly over her and his hand found its way to her core. When he touched her she moaned and her whole body went languid. She pulled him down for a kiss and I left, stumbling down the conveyer and away, my stomach rebelling againt the bitterness in my mouth.

That would never be me. It would _never_ be me who was lost in desire, never be me who was _whole_ in her body. That had been taken from me so long ago, I'd almost forgotten what I had lost.

I was broken.

A farm dog growled a warning to let me know I was straying too far from the barn. Somehow I found my way back inside, squinting because the lamplight hurt my eyes, or maybe it was tears that stung them. I stopped by my bedroll, the only one empty when everyone else had already gone to sleep, and stared at the other Warden. I wavered, imagining him touching me like Firetooth had touched his woman... In a moment my hands were shaking with panic and my tunic cold with sweat.

I stripped off my armor as quietly as I could and crawled under my blanket, wrapping myself up in a tight ball despite the stuffy heat of the crowded barn. Gradually the pounding of my blood in my ears quieted; I lay and listened to the snores and shuffles of the people around me for what felt like hours. Firetooth and Nightsong came back inside, whispering together.

Alistair rolled over in his sleep, incrementally closer to me, and heat flared under my skin. Before I slept, a thought rose unbidden and presented itself: Sometimes, what was broken could be fixed.


	41. Bad Business

I woke slowly, aware of the noise of cutlery and sizzle of bacon even while trying to cling to sleep. But when Alistair sat down beside me and I heard him put down a plate of food, I gave it up as a bad job and sat up to eat.

"Thanks," I told him over my fried egg.

"You're welcome." He smiled, looking perfectly awake and healthy. Damn, that elfroot was good stuff. There must be some way to make it grow underground, maybe with enough lyrium... "I would have let you sleep longer, but I was afraid there wouldn't be any bacon left if I didn't snag some for you. You looked so tired."

"I've slept better, but I'll manage." I reached for his cup of water and drained it.

"We can sleep in Denerim tonight, in a real bed, if you like," he suggested, getting up to refill his cup. "We could probably get all our errands done in one day but it's hard to pass up the chance for a real tavern dinner, and then it'd be too late to walk back here, so..."

"That's a pretty flimsy excuse. I'll come up with a better one eventually. Yes, let's stay in Denerim." I was beginning to get excited in spite of myself at seeing the capitol city and its harbor.

"Should we all go? Perhaps some of us would be more comfortable here," Leliana said delicately.

"Morrigan, do you want to come? Ooh! You could be a raven and ride on Rocky's back." I grinned at the image, mentally adding an eye-patch and peg leg to Pirate Rocky, Terror of the Nine Seas.

She frowned uncertainly, and looked away out the barn door at the fields and distant trees. "I... Perhaps 'tis not a good idea to leave the tribe alone."

"I'll stay," Wynne said unexpectedly.

"You wouldn't like to see anyone in the city?" Alistair asked in surprise. "Isn't there usually a Circle contingent there?"

"Yes, there is," she said shortly. "One I haven't seen in some years, and... I'm rather feeling my age today. I'd rather he didn't see me."

"He?" Leliana repeated, eyes lighting with interest, but Wynne silenced her with a scowl.

"Are you not feeling well?" I asked Wynne, to get Leliana off the subject. "Should we get you anything in town? A softer blanket or something?"

"No, I'm as well as could be expected," she muttered. "It's my birthday today, that's all. I'm looking down the shaft of a new decade, and I don't like what I see."

"Happy birthday!" Leliana clapped her hands, and we all joined in. Wynne grimaced.

"In Antiva, women born in this month are considered lucky," Zevran commented over the dagger he was sharpening. "And lucky you are, with such a bosom at your age."

"Maker's breath, Zevran!" Alistair gasped, scandalized, but Wynne laughed.

"Let me guess," Zevran said then, turning to me. "You were born near the end of winter, no? It is written all over your face. I am never wrong about such things."

"I have no idea," I admitted. "I'm not even precisely sure how old I am. My mam lost track at some point and since then I've been guessing."

"Lost track?" Alistair repeated, outraged. "Of her daughter's birthday?"

"Hey, at least she didn't lose track of the actual daughter," I shrugged, but Alistair didn't seem to find it funny and continued to scowl and look affronted. As if it was _his_ birthday she forgot, I thought wryly.

"Then I declare today your birthday," Leliana said with great authority. "We shall have cake, and I shall sing you a birthday song."

"After we find Genitivi," I said firmly. "Business before pleasure."

And without further ado, we shouldered our bags and struck out for Denerim. Morrigan stayed behind after all, to my disappointment – I had rather been looking forward to seeing her reactions to the city and its bustle.

The great walls enclosed the older parts of the city, but newer, somewhat ramshackle wooden buildings clustered around its outside where the populace had spilled out of its enclosed space. They were lucky to have the option, really, unlike the citizens of Orzammar. The bored-looking guards at the gate spared us only a glance, and we were inside.

I grinned as I looked around and above me at the old buildings. Wood and plaster covered the fronts and made up the attics, which seemed awfully flimsy, but I supposed they would just rebuild it if it fell down. Wood was certainly cheap enough up here.

Alistair led us a few blocks until the street opened up into a broad marketplace, three or four times the size of the Commons and absolutely packed. The noise was incredible, even without a roof to trap the echoes, and merchants shouted and waved, competing with their voices and the brightness of their stalls for our attention and our gold. Rocky grew agitated at being unable to keep track of all the people, and walked so close he kept bumping my hip and pushing me into Alistair, such that I felt like a dog-and-templar sandwich.

"Keep hold of your bags," Alistair shouted at us all over the din. "I've had my pocket picked more times than I'd like to admit. Unless anyone has shopping to do, we're just going to walk through. Teagan's directions said Genitivi's house is right on the other side."

"Oh, but they have ribbons!" Leliana cried, gazing longingly at a particularly brilliant booth.

"Dwarven crafts! Fine dwarven crafts!"

I looked eagerly in the direction of the voice and spotted a stocky dwarf with a neatly plaited beard standing beside an impressive array of armor and weaponry. I grabbed Alistair's hand and dragged him over. "Hey! Hey, my name is Latitia. This is my first visit to Denerim," I told the merchant happily, pleased to see another dwarf in the big city.

His eyes flicked over my brand, but he couldn't be certain I was born casteless and hadn't just taken the brand as a result of leaving for the surface, so he smiled smoothly and crossed his arms over his chest in a polite greeting. "Atrast vala, Latitia. My name is Gorim. How are you enjoying the city?"

"It's more like home than anything I've seen so far," I said, gesturing broadly to indicate the crowds and the noise. "But considering how tall humans are, you'd think they would build bigger houses. It's not like there's a ceiling or anything."

He chuckled, softening a little. "I think they're afraid that, if they build anything too tall, it'll collapse in on itself."

"If anyone built like this in Orzammar, they'd be flogged," I agreed.

"Hello, human standing _right here_," Alistair huffed.

"Yes, and in terrible armor," Gorim smirked and tipped his head towards his wares. "Care for an upgrade?"

"Ooh, let's," I said, picking up a heavy helmet and turning it over to look at the price tag.

"But this is my Gray-" Alistair started to protest, but caught himself. "I mean, it's my family armor. I like it."

"Suit yourself." Gorim shrugged. "Just make sure to update your will before your next battle."

Alistair turned back towards Genitivi's house, a little sullenly. I trotted after him, snaring Leliana from the ribbon stall, and told him in a conciliatory undertone, "His prices were outrageous, anyway."

Alistair pulled out a folded and battered piece of paper and consulted it, leading us to a shuttered apartment with 'Brother Genitivi' on the letterbox. He knocked politely, and we waited.

Nobody came.

"Should we come back later?" I asked, and tried not to fidget. I wanted to explore, not sit here and wait.

"Wardens," Zevran said suddenly, peering inside the letterbox. "Look. There is mail here from last week. He must have gone on an extended journey."

"Oh, all right then," I said cheerfully, and dug around in my pack for some lockpicks. "Guys, stand around me and look innocent."

A minute or two later and the well-maintained lock clicked open, the door swinging outward to release a truly dreadful stench.

"Andraste's flaming sword, did he leave a whole roast ox in here to rot?" Alistair choked out, covering his nose with his hand. "Maker, it's in my _mouth_! Ugh!"

"That's not rotting food," Zevran said darkly, and Rocky agreed, a growl rumbling low in his chest.

Leliana threw open the shutters to let air and light in, revealing the complete disaster of the apartment. "I think that confirms your suspicions of foul play, Zev," I said, looking over the ransacked parlor. "It looks like a herd of brontos came through here."

Rocky darted about the few rooms, looking for threats, but found something else in the study. He backed out through the doorway, sneezing and pawing his nose, and a cloud of flies buzzed angrily out after him. Alistair brushed past him and opened the study's shutters, revealed the bloated corpse of a man lying on the floor.

"Stone's mercy, is that Genitivi?" I cried.

Alistair shook his head. "It might have been his apprentice, or his house-sitter, or something. I think Teagan said he had a man in to help him. Genitivi has dark hair, this poor fellow is blonde."

Zevran tsked disapprovingly. "A most unprofessional job of it, too. If the murderer had known what he was about, he could have made it look like the man had just gone on holiday, and nobody would know."

Alistair shook his head, pointing down and saying, "They wanted us to know. It's a warning." A note on the body read, "THE URN IS NOT MEANT TO BE FOUND."

"Ah! So they merely have a taste for the dramatic." Zevran squared his shoulders and began shifting through the piles of paper on the floor. "I suppose we had better start looking for information. I, for one, would like to reach our scholar before the murderers do, and they have a head start."

With that, we began to rifle through the papers and books scattered across the floor. A sad heap of ashes in the fireplace told of what the murderer had done with the information we sought, however, and several hours of searching revealed nothing but a great deal of odd speculations about the Fade – evidently the scholar had been working on another project in his spare time. Then Leliana let out a cry of excitement, "I found a safe in the wall!"

Several minutes and a couple of bent and broken lockpicks later (evidently Genitivi valued his safe more than his house) and I held a small packet of paper with the name 'Arl Eamon Guerrin' on the front. I handed it to Alistair as the closest substitute.

He opened it and began to read out loud. "My lord, I have left this in the care of my servant Weylon to deliver to you if you come in search of me. I have been researching the Urn as requested..." He trailed off, muttering to himself as he scanned the long letter. "Strange accidents... helpful fellow scholar turned up dead... It sounds like these guys really don't want him to find the Urn. Here we go – he's drawn a map of a place called Haven. I guess that's where we go next. He says it's... damn, it's in the Frostbacks."

Near Orzammar. Well, I knew we would have to go to Orzammar eventually. "All right, then. But we should check in with Teagan first, let him know what we're about."

"Poor Weylon," Alistair said sadly, looking at the corpse. "He kept his master's secrets to the death. We should ask the Chantry to give him a decent burial, see if he has any family around."

"Or you could explain yourself to the city guard, that works too," came a hard voice from the doorway, and we all looked up to see a chainmail-suited sergeant with flaming red hair and a well-used sword in his hand, flanked by several less-certain guardsmen. "Care to tell me why you're breaking and entering? While you're at it, you can inform me as to how that man there," he gestured to the corpse with the point of his sword, "came to such a sorry state."

* * *

_It's Kylon! Squeee! *jumps up and down*_

_Ahem. Great big sloppy kisses – I mean, many thanks (still stuck on Kylon I guess) to all my readers, especially roxfox62, Cruellye (that's my mom! Y'all be nice to her now), Nithu, mille libri (mmm... mille libri's Kylon...), Enaid Aderyn, Arsinoe de Blassenville, bioncafemme, Shakary, Eva Galana, Sin Piedad, The Fall., Serenbach, interesting2125 and anyone I missed who has left a review. You make my day!_


	42. Tourism

Dropping Arl Eamon's name helped a little to cool the city guard's temper, but the scarred and clearly jimmied lock on the door didn't look so good. At least the sergeant, who introduced himself as Kylon, couldn't blame Weylon's death on us when the man had obviously died at least several days ago.

"Fine," the sergeant sighed. "I'd ask you why you didn't come to the guard instead, but it's painfully obvious why not." He cast a disgusted look over his shoulder at his men, huddling on the far side of the street with their handkerchiefs over their noses, as far from the dead body as possible.

"And don't think I don't know who you really are," he added, and flicked Alistair's makeshift surcoat with a gloved finger. "Gray Warden Alistair. The drawing was pretty accurate. Where's the other one? The warrant said there were was another – a woman."

"Um," I said uncertainly. "Are you going to arrest us, or what?"

"'Us?'" He looked down – a long way down – at my face, and drooped with apparent disappointment. "Oh. ...No, I'm not going to arrest you. I'm not that stupid." He sighed and pulled out a notebook, sitting down at the table to begin writing his report. "I'll make sure his family is found. My beat is the market, and you can find me there if you learn anything more."

I guessed this meant we were dismissed, and we filed out through the door. We paused for a moment in the relatively fresh air of the street, taking deep, grateful breaths.

"We missed lunch," I said when my stomach growled.

"Yeah." Alistair raked a hand through his hair, looking wan. "Something about a week-old body puts a man off his appetite."

"Even a Gray Warden? Unheard-of," Leliana teased. "It's a little early for dinner. Want to get a snack here, and then maybe do a little sightseeing?"

"That sounds good-" I began, but an energetic entrepreneur came around the corner at a run, his little food cart rattling along in front of him.

"Did I hear somebody needs a snack?" he cried, a little out of breath. "I have sausages! And buns!"

He unfolded his cart to reveal his wares. Leliana and Zevran refused to touch the mystery meat, but to a duster, a dog, and a hungry Warden it smelled amazing and I dug a few coppers out of my pocket. "Give me three," I ordered, and Rocky, Alistair and I gulped down the unidentifiable tubes of meat-like food product as we meandered along the edge of the market district.

"Well, I've had better," Alistair admitted, wiping his hands on the hem of his surcoat. "But there's a certain guilty pleasure in a street sausage – hey! It's the Wonders of Thedas! Arl Eamon bought me a golem doll there once."

He smiled, his gaze turned inward at the rare happy memory. It must have been before Isolde ruined everything, I thought, and grabbed his hand. "Let's go in and look around," I suggested, tugging him in. _Maybe they'll have another one_.

The store contained a dizzying array of every random, bizarre thing I could imagine, and quite a few I couldn't. Bookshelves stood in rows along one side, jars of spell components on the other, tables and display cases of exotic artifacts and more mundane trinkets in the middle and, for some reason, a stuffed alligator hanging from the ceiling. After a moment I realized it wasn't just the variety making me dizzy – many of the objects inside radiated palpable magic, bouncing off my dwarven skin in an unsettling way.

Alistair tried not to be too obvious about looking for a new golem toy, wandering up and down the rows of display cases with an unconvincing air of disinterest.

"Latitia," Leliana called me to the bookshelves. "Look at this. Do you think Wynne would want it?"

She pointed to a book bound in white leather, titled "Spirit Healing." I snatched it up and began pawing through the pages, past detailed illustrations and accounting of how to use the benevolent spirits of the Fade for serious healing.

"Who cares about Wynne, I want this for Morrigan!" I said, deeply gratified. "I've been looking for a way to make her into a healer for weeks. I was hoping Wynne would teach her, but every time I try to be friendly with her she goes off on a lecture."

"You too?" Zevran said. I jumped, startled at his sudden appearance. "She has been trying to convince me I should be crushed beneath the weight of my guilt. As if somehow I could make up for murder by being sad about it." He shrugged.

I took the book to the creepy Tranquil shopkeeper and winced at the number of coins left on the counter. Then we followed the briny smell of pickled fish as the sun drifting lower in the sky, until we at last emerged into the harbor district. The Drakon River poured into the sea, its throat clogged with docks and ships, few of which resembled the very out-of-date pictures available in the Shaperate. The docks themselves seemed manned mostly by elves, who loaded and unloaded cargo under the eyes of their human overlords despite being universally smaller and more delicately built. I pointed this out to Zevran.

"Ah, but didn't you know?" he said lightly. "Manual labor is far too lowbrow for these grand merchantmen. Better to let the elves do it. It's not as though _elves_ have dignity."

Feeling a tiny bit smug, I pointed out a broad-shouldered dwarven merchant engaged in re-packing a load of goods for a larger ship. "That dwarf is doing his own packing."

"Only because he does not trust the elves with his precious cargo. Everyone knows knife-ears will steal anything that isn't nailed down."

"Language, Zevran," Leliana chided. "Those are hate words."

"I apologize, my bluebird," he said with an extravagant bow. "Something about the sailors brings out the worst in me."

"I can't see the ocean past all the boats," I complained, and followed Alistair up to one of the crumbling old walls that used to protect the city from attack by sea.

"Now they have a huge chain that they stretch across the harbor," Alistair explained as we reached the parapets. "The Orlesians installed it. See?"

He pointed at something on the far tip of the river mouth, but I couldn't see it. With the light glinting off the water and my slight nearsightedness, I could barely focus past the ends of the piers. What I could see, though, was _vast_.

"It... it goes forever, doesn't it?" I was whispering, though I wasn't sure why.

"Well," he said, scratching his head. "There's this guy who says he sailed all the way around and came back to where he started. So in a sense, it does go forever."

I stared at it for another few moments and then turned around to climb down, feeling very small and insignificant.

That feeling lasted about as long as it took for us to find a relatively nice inn, just far enough from the docks to avoid the laziest sailors but not so far that it could resist being named the Cormorant, a black bird stretching its neck in flight across its sign. We reserved rooms, dropped off our armor and bags and washed up a little. After that, I was wholly occupied in getting dinner.

We'd evidently arrived just before the dinner rush. All at once, several groups of sailors and other nautical-looking fellows began crowding in until the tavern was quite full, and we had to shout to hear each other. I was about to suggest we find someplace else instead, when somebody produced a mouth organ, someone else a set of pipes, and between that and the ale, the atmosphere because irresistibly jolly.

"Ooh, I haven't danced a jig in ages," Leliana cried, clapping her hands.

I looked quickly at Alistair, who paled, but rallied with a great show of courage. "Would you like to dance?"

"Do you know how?" I asked. "Because I sure don't."

He shook his head, visibly relieved, and Zevran instantly stood and swept Leliana away to a darker corner for his own particular brand of dance.

"Maker's breath, look at him go," Alistair said, slightly awed. "I don't know how he gets away with it."

"I think he's still working on trying to find out what her undies look like," I told him, and briefly outlined our conversation on the subject. "Not that she wears her robes anymore," I added. "Thank the ancestors. Her new leather is much more practical."

"I got you something," he blurted suddenly, digging around in his pocket. "While you were shopping. Happy birthday."

I sat up expectantly, and he dropped a pocketknife into my hand. I unfolded the tapered blade and tested it against my fingernail, squealing in delight at its fine edge. "What a nice gift! How thoughtful!"

"Yes, well," he rubbed at the back of his neck, reddening slightly. "I thought about, you know, flowers and jewelry and such, but you're not really that kind of girl... are you?"

"No, not really." I set to work fixing the end of my belt, trimming off the rough leather that had bothered me ever since I'd had to lop off the last six inches with my dagger to make it fit. Almost hesitantly, Alistair scooted his chair closer to mine and draped an arm around my shoulders. I thought nothing of it, except to lean on him a little, focused on making a nice curved edge.

Then I froze, second-guessing myself. What did he mean, "not that kind of girl?" A girl like Leliana, or Nightsong, or Rica, any of whom would have frowned at the gift of a knife and wondered what in earth he had been thinking. I'd assumed that was a good thing, but... There was a reason Rica dressed up and primped her hair when she was looking for customers. That's what men like... right?

I looked up at him searchingly; he'd been watching my hands work, but met my gaze with a guileless smile. "Not that I don't like pretty things," I told him. "I like my rose."

His smile broadened and he squeezed my shoulder affectionately. "You just like the smell," he said, but I could tell he was pleased that I remembered it.

Abruptly, I asked him, "Don't you think Nightsong is beautiful?"

He blinked at the non sequitur. "I suppose. She's not really my type. Isn't she Firetooth's mate, though?"

"What about Leliana? Hypothetically."

"This is kind of a weird line of questioning. Should I get a lawyer?"

I realized I was being annoying and felt my cheeks redden; since when was I clingy and insecure? "Nah, I'm... I'm just thinking about Zevran, actually. Wondering if he really likes her or just wants some fun," I improvised.

"Oh, who knows with him?" Alistair glanced back to the extravagantly tangoing couple in the far corner, in their own space because the other patrons had prudently moved aside for them. We watched for a little while – not their sole audience, either, a sizable group gathering to clap out the beat with enthusiasm – until Rocky heaved a great, put-upon sigh from his place under the table to let me know we were keeping him up past bedtime.

"Alistair, you still want to look for Goldanna tomorrow, right?" I asked as we climbed the stairs to our rooms.

I was following him, and saw his shoulders tense instantly, the muscles knotting visibly under the fabric of his tunic. But he answered steadily enough. "If we have time. If you don't mind."

"Of course I don't mind." We came to his door and I caught him by the waist, hugging him tightly and rubbing those poor anxious muscles as best I could reach. He stood in silence until I ventured, "But if you'll take some advice? You might have a bath tonight, and make sure you have clean clothes to wear. You know, something with a minimum of bloodstains."

He laughed a little. "I suppose that would be a little alarming, wouldn't it? An armored, bloody, apparent mercenary showing up on her doorstep... Maybe we shouldn't go," he added, tensing again.

"You said you wanted to warn her about the Blight, though," I reminded him. "We might not be back here for ages."

After a long moment, he said, very low, "You're right. I have a duty to her, as her brother." He gently moved my hands and went down the hall again, looking for one of the inn's staff to ask for hot water.

More than a little apprehensive myself, I went to my own room and settled down as much as I could with the noise from the tavern downstairs, turning the problem over and over in my head.

Surely just showing up at her door wasn't the best thing to do... How would I react if some random guy burst in on me right now and claimed to be my long-lost brother? I'd think he was drunk, or just crazy, and tell him to take his story to someone who cared. Maybe if I went to her first, and explained, and maybe arranged that we eat lunch together... And I drifted off mid-thought.

* * *

A sharp tapping woke me with a start very early, the sunlight a mere gray wash through the dirty window. I squinted around, looking for the source, just as a great black bird attacked the windowpane with that same sharp tapping. I stood up, suddenly wide awake, and went to the window.

"Morrigan?" I called, figuring there wasn't any other black bird who was interested in my window.

The bird attempted to land on the windowsill, but couldn't get purchase on the narrow wood. I fumbled around until I figured out how to open the window, and she fluttered in, transforming at once into her human self. She smoothed her hair back, trying to recover the dignity she had lost in her clumsy entry.

"You have been upsetting people again." She shook herself, absently letting out a sort of growl in response to Rocky's greeting. "Armed men are about to storm this inn. I advise you prepare yourself."

* * *

_Why is Kylon disappointed? Because he would rather star in mille libri's Freely We Serve!_

_www dot fanfiction dot net/s/5839763/1/Freely_We_Serve_

_Chocolate ship cybercookies to anyone who spots both Discworld references ;)_

_And as usual, you guys are fabulous and exert a mystical force on my orbit like a sort of literary Plant X, only more awesome._


	43. Blood and Gold

"How many?" I asked quickly, throwing my leather vest over my head and shoving my feet into my boots.

"Perhaps a dozen hired thugs, and a leader who carries no weapons I can see," Morrigan said.

I threw open the door to my room and ran to Alistair's, banging on the door and yelling, "Up! Now!" I repeated this on Zevran's and Leliana's doors before running back to my own, trying to scramble into more of my armor. I collided with Alistair on the way and bounced off him as though I'd hit a tree.

"What's going on?" he demanded, still rubbing his eyes.

"Morrigan says people are coming to kill us," I explained as I strapped on my belt with my daggers still attached.

"I did not," Morrigan said coolly. "I merely said armed men are preparing to storm the inn. Perhaps they wish to chat, or have tea."

"Right, so put your armor on," I said, hopping back out into the corridor on one foot as I struggled to get the other through the straps of my leg armor. "Zevran! For the love of the ancestors, at least put on some shorts!"

He stretched luxuriously, causing Leliana to turn crimson and Morrigan to turn away with a snort of disgust. "If you insist. But you should know that nudity is one of the most dangerous weapons in my arsenal."

And the front door slammed open. Men swarmed in and Rocky, Morrigan and I were the only ones even remotely prepared, and only because they didn't have any armor to put on. We would be easy prey in close quarters – Rocky and I relied on maneuverability to stay alive.

"Morrigan, we have to buy time for Alistair," I shouted, but needn't have wasted the breath. She was already at the head of the stairs and chanting, and as soon as the stairway was full of men, she flung out her hands and released an astonishing amount of ice. The air seemed almost to warp and a violent wind gusted through the hallway, shattering windows and pressing painfully on my ears. The men on the stairs frosted over, and the stairs themselves shone with an inch-thick shell of solid ice. She stumbled back, panting.

Rocky leaped at them with a delighted bark, hitting the closest in the chest and knocking him over backwards. The man's feet broke off at the ankles and he fell back, bringing the entire stairway full of thugs crashing to the floor in a sodden heap as the spell began to wear off.

Leliana appeared beside me with her bow and exchanged a worried glance with me. Men groaned in pain and struggled numbly to disentangle themselves. Morrigan's ice slick was slowing them down, but we didn't dare climb over it to take advantage of their confusion. Leliana shot the first three who made progress, intimidating the rest, until a swarthy man with short-cropped black hair cursed them all for cowards and directed a shimmering jet of flame at the icy stairs. Steam billowed out, giving them cover, and if he scorched his own men's heels, it only encouraged them to climb faster.

We fell back down the hall to get out of the steam. The first lobster-red brigand who emerged from the cloud went down with a throwing knife in his throat and I glanced back to see Zevran, still shirtless and enjoying himself immensely, take up position beside Leliana with a fistful of those slender knives.

"Always with the knives, eh, Zevran?" I called over my shoulder as I wrestled Rocky around into a position at my side. He wanted very badly to charge.

"Phallic symbols," Morrigan snorted. She looked a good deal less pale after a moment's break but still breathing hard.

Two, then three men appeared, and then the hall was so full they were tripping over each other in their haste to get away from their own leader. I let Rocky go to deflect the first sword; my dog latched onto the man's elbow and wrenched him down, pulling his armor askew and exposing some skin around his collarbone for me. _Good dog,_ I thought as I wrenched my bloody dagger free.

Arrows and knives flew over my head and for once I was glad to be the shortest fighter in the room. Not every shot killed its target, not with the increased confusion, but none of them missed entirely and several men had arrows or knives stuck into their armor, hampering them. Even so, Rocky growled when a blade sliced across his flank, and I was too busy to do anything about it.

"Alistair, come _on_!" I shouted, took out a man's knee and tried to jump away from his falling blade. My back hit the wall and the sword's tip scraped into my leather vest, leaving a long red line across my chest.

Morrigan flicked her hands and gained us a few seconds' breath as her mind blast swept down the corridor. Rocky and I killed the two closest to us and then I willingly let Alistair push past me, barely half-armored but big enough to block the whole hallway with sword and shield. The last few men took one look at him and bolted.

"Their mage," I shoved Alistair after them. "Hurry! They have a mage!"

He took off in pursuit with the rest of us rattling along after him, and shouted in excitement at the sight of the mage's robes flitting out through the front door. He jumped down the last four stairs and had just made it out the door when the roof over the inn's front porch collapsed, billowing smoke and sending splinters flying everywhere as the mage's trap sprang.

"Stone's mercy, Alistair-" I ran to the pile of lumber to dig him out, but he called to me from inside, muffled but alive.

"I'm fine! Don't let him get away or he'll just try again tomorrow!"

Morrigan swooped past me and out an open window, snapping her black wings open in the bright sunlight outside and hovering to caw impatiently at me. I wriggled through the narrow window and fell to the ground, rolling to my feet and running after her toward the harbor. Behind me, I heard Rocky's complaints and struggles as he got stuck halfway through.

I had no intention of trying to kill the mage alone. I had left my bow behind, I had no Templar, no dog, and no backup except Morrigan and I wasn't sure she'd be willing to kill another apostate – for surely he wasn't a Circle mage or he wouldn't be ambushing travelers in their beds. But neither did I want him to disappear and attempt another assassination later, so I wove through the early morning traffic and the dock workers trying to get a head start on their labor, following the black speck that was my eye in the sky.

I turned a corner at top speed onto a pier, and slammed into a truly enormous man. No just ordinary human big, but blotting-out-the-sun big, with dark skin, pale braided hair, and an expression like he wasn't at all surprised to have bloodstained dwarf women bouncing off him, it was just the sort of behavior he'd come to expect in this backwater dump.

The mage looked up at the noise of my ass skidding ungracefully on the wooden planking. He dropped the duffel he carried – he must have meant to escape on the elegant little ship anchored here – and brought up his hands, his mouth forming the first words of a spell even as Morrigan stooped, hawk-like, and blurred into her human form on the dock in front of him.

He jerked back from her and seemed to change his mind about his spell, drawing a dagger instead. I scrambled to my feet and drew my own, thinking he meant to attack her, but instead he slashed the dagger across his own palm and flung out his hand. An improbable amount of blood sprayed out at her, hissing like acid.

Morrigan had already begun an ice spell, though, and she reacted instantly to direct her spell at the blood instead of the man. I ducked as bloodsicles flew over my head and shattered on the dock to sizzle as they began to melt through the wood.

"_Saarebas_!" An ear-shattering bellow came from the giant – he stampeded past me like a whole herd of brontos, pulling a massive sword off his back and bellowing something about cutting out mage's tongues. He brushed Morrigan out of his way as a mere inconvenient obstacle, sending her tumbling into the choppy water.

"_Katera, bas,_" the giant shouted, and smoothly cleaved the man's head from his shoulders. Then he pulled out a towel, wiped his blade clean with the care another man might show his lover, and stalked up the gangway to the waiting ship, ignoring the appalled stares of her crew. I blinked at his back, wondering where I'd seen that glower before. Lothering? Impossible!

Morrigan crawled out on shore in wolf shape and shook herself dry, indignant. Then she morphed directly into her raven again, launched herself into the air, and disappeared. I watched her go with disappointment. She never let me gush over her after a battle.

Back at the inn, Zevran and Leliana had extricated Alistair, who'd escaped with only some bruises and splinters. I was ignoring his unmanly yips and whimpers while I dug splinters out of his hands when a strangled gasp came from the street outside. The poor innkeeper had come back from his before-breakfast grocery shopping, seen the wreckage and the dead bodies, and looked about to collapse in a dead faint.

"My apologies, goodman," Zevran said smoothly. "Your inn was set upon by brigands. Do not fear, we ran them off. Please feel free to send your repair bills to the city – after all, if the guard were doing their job properly, ordinary citizens like yourself wouldn't have to deal with these sorts of things, would they? It's a shame, what people get up to these days."

"Buh," the man said, tottering.

"I think we should go," Zevran told us in an undertone, and we grabbed our bags and scarpered.

"Did anyone think to go through those fellows' pockets?" I asked as I jogged along after the others, who set a fast pace to distance ourselves from the violence.

"Of course, _carina_, how could I forget such a thing?" Zevran answered, flashing his brilliant teeth at me over his shoulder. "They were not so considerate as to provide a written confession complete with name and address of their employer, but they did have some rather odd coins."

"Dated thirty years ago from the Orlesian occupation's mint, despite all those coins having been melted down after Maric regained the throne," Alistair explained.

"Which fits with Genitivi's idea of an isolated mountain hamlet," Leliana said. "I think he was right, and the Urn's in Haven, and for some reason the Havenites don't want it found. They must have been watching his house."

"Havenites?" I echoed.

"It has a nice ring to it, don't you think? Anyway, we should leave straight away in case there's any more of them lurking about."

"But what about Goldanna?" I asked, catching Alistair's hand. "Surely we can spare the time to knock on her door."

His hand closed tightly on mine. "I don't – I wouldn't want to slow us down, and I'm all dusty, and... Oh, who am I kidding? I'm just making excuses." He released me and started trying to dust himself off, straightening his clothes and hair.

We emerged into the market district, much quieter in the morning as most of the merchants were still setting up for the day, except for the ones who sold food. I gestured toward the upscale inn standing on the fashionable end of the market, away from the fishmongers, and said, "Zev, can you and Rocky and Leliana go in there to wait? I don't know how long we'll be and you might as well grab breakfast."

"You're coming with me?" Alistair asked in a very small voice.

"Are you joking? I'm not letting you in there alone." I waited until the others were out of earshot and added, "There's a really good chance it won't go well."

"You mean, because she doesn't know me? Maybe she doesn't even know I exist," he said miserably, then brightened. "But she's my family! I've dreamed about her for so long. My sister! My _sisterrrr_..." He rolled the word around in his mouth as though tasting it and started off, looking at house numbers.

"It won't be like the Fade," I argued, jogging after him. "There won't be pie."

"You don't know that, there _might_ be pie," he said. "Maybe she'll invite us to breakfast! Oh, here it is!"

I grabbed his wrist and made one last-ditch effort to keep him from disappointment. I hoped I was wrong, and he could be mad at me afterward for being such a wet blanket, but... "Sometimes family isn't what you expect it to be. Some are like Rica but some are like Leske's dad-"

"This isn't Dust Town!" he snapped, flushing. "Stop assuming everyone is as awful as they are!" And he shook me off and pushed the front door open. A little bell tinkled.

He stepped in and looked around at the empty room, scrubbed and clean, hung with clotheslines across one end and big kettles for washing on the other. He lifted his voice and called, "Er... Hello?"

A door banged open upstairs and hurried footsteps came rattling down, until a thin, harassed-looking woman rushed into the main room. "I ain't open for another half hour yet," she protested, but stopped when she got a good look at Alistair. Battered and stained though he was, his equipment was clearly a cut above what the average Joe could afford, and she narrowed her eyes with a businesswoman's gleam. As usual, I went entirely unnoticed.

"You have linens to wash?" she asked, clearly trying to be professional despite the sharp edge of stress in her voice. Upstairs I could hear children banging around and arguing. "I charge three bits on the bundle, you won't find better. And don't trust what that Nalia woman tells you either, she's foreign and she'll rob you blind."

"Uh, no," Alistair said, then looked down at himself and laughed, nervous and high-pitched. "Though I probably should. No, I... This might sound strange, but are you Goldanna? If you are, then I suppose... I'm your brother."

I cringed, cursing the hurried decision-making that had led to him blurting out such shocking news. The woman straightened, almost forgetting to be tired in the face of her surprise. Then her face hardened. "You! They said you was dead, them at the castle! They said the babe was dead along with the mother, gave me a coin to shut my mouth, but I _knew_ they was lying!"

Alistair faltered and began apologizing automatically. "I'm sorry, I didn't know that. I'm not dead-"

"That coin didn't last long, neither! And here I been struggling along with five mouths to feed," she went on, boiling over with a lifetime of resentment, and I stepped in.

"We want to help – _he_ wants to help," I said. She blinked at me as though she'd had no idea I was even there, and scowled. I went on before she could start telling me off. "It was wrong of them at the castle to send you away. They didn't tell Alistair about you, either, or you wouldn't have been alone all this time. You'd have had him."

"I don't need a brother, I needed Mother," she said, and her voice caught. "I was just a girl and she was all I had, and he took her from me!" She turned back to Alistair and spat, "You _killed_ Mother, you did!"

He went absolutely white. What charity I had felt for her was rapidly waning and I clenched my teeth – how _dare_ she blame him!

"And if all you got is empty words," she continued, "then you can take them to someone who cares. I got five boys who ain't living as they've a right to, and here you come in with all your fancy gear showing away – who do you think you are, anyway? A Prince?" She scoffed. "Your royal father forced himself on my mother. You ain't a proper Prince. You ain't nothin' but a reminder of what that arsehole took from me."

She turned as if to go back upstairs, but Alistair called out to her. "Wait! I – I have to tell you something-"

"You ain't got nothing I want to hear," she muttered.

"There's a Blight coming!"

She froze for an instant, and then laughed shakily. "Why should I believe you?"

"I'm a Gray Warden," he told her with a hint of pride, no doubt thinking she would be impressed and maybe even change her mind. It didn't work.

"Well, ain't you fancy," she sneered. "A Prince and a Gray Warden, too. Who am I to think poorly o' someone so high and mighty compared to me? And how am I supposed to do anything about this Blight with no money? Alls you did was give me summat else to worry about, as if I ain't got enough."

"I could give you some money," he offered hesitantly, and looked down at me. "Can I do that? Fifteen sovereigns would buy her family passage to the Free Marches."

I shrugged. I really doubted she would leave her home, and fifteen sovereigns would put a serious dent in our purse, but I couldn't possibly say no to him. I pulled the money out of my vest and handed it over, and she snatched it away, the coins disappearing into her purse instantly.

"Don't think you can buy me with this," she growled and turned again to leave. "You, a Prince and all that fancy armor, and this is all you got to offer? You must think I'm very stupid."

"No, I don't think that at all, I want to help," Alistair called after her desperately, but the door slammed and the bolt slid into place on the inside. Her sharp admonishments to her children were clearly audible through the door; evidently they had made a mess of their breakfast.

"By all the ancestors," I whispered. That had gone just about as badly as it possibly could have. At least she hadn't tried to stab him or anything. I reached for Alistair's hand but he jerked away, bolting from the house, and all I could do was follow.


	44. All Shapes and Sizes

Alistair strode jerkily through the increasing crowds in the marketplace and I had to run to keep up. "You were right," he growled. "I hope you're happy."

"I would have been happier if I'd been wrong."

He stopped so suddenly I stepped on his heel. "That was the family I've dreamed about? That gold-digging harridan is my sister?" He shook his head in disgust. "Maker, but I'm a fool."

"She's been dealt a bad hand," I tried to make excuses for her, even though I would rather have given her a good slap. I'd been dealt a bad hand too, and you didn't see me blaming everyone in earth for it... though many others in Dust Town did. "And she had quite a shock, seeing you. We can visit again, after the Blight, after she's had time to think about how nice you were-"

"You mean after the money's run out and she's ready to soak me for more?" He laughed, the bitterness incongruous on his usually sunny face. "I was happier when I thought I had no family at all."

"I'm sorry," I said miserably. I shouldn't have let him go. I should have managed it better.

"I guess I just thought she would accept me without question. Isn't that what family does?"

"Yes..." I said, tentatively working towards an idea. "And if she doesn't, then she's not your real family. Family is more than just what vag squirted you out-"

"Don't talk about my mother that way," he said, but without heat. He was too tired to be angry. "I'm done talking about this. Let's go. Please, let's just get out of this city."

He was silent and withdrawn as we collected the others, and, more worrying still, refused breakfast. We followed along in his wake as he made a beeline for the city gates. I was still working on a sandwich and lagged behind slightly, and then stopped walking entirely when an exotic animal display caught my attention.

A nug twitched its floppy ears at me, but that wasn't what distracted me – a great big bird with a wickedly curved beak and bright blue-and-red coloring sat on a perch, preening its long tail. While I watched, it removed and tossed aside a loose feather, deep sapphire blue and as long as my forearm. I scooped the feather up and tucked it into my vest, running to catch up to the others before my thievery was noticed.

The walk back to the farm was tense and uncomfortable. Leliana was visibly bursting with curiosity but too polite to actually ask, while Alistair was avoiding everyone's eyes and taking cruel advantage of his longer legs to ensure I'd be fully occupied with trying to keep up. If Zevran's eyes flicked in Alistair's direction occasionally, it was no more than his usual subtle alertness.

A few of the Wolf Tribe kids were playing in front of the barn and caught sight of us first, immediately jumping up and down and running around to inform the others, yelling "Look! Wardens! Look!" Alistair disappeared into the barn, muttering about packing up, but my Warden-sense told me he kept walking out the back door and into the wooded area beyond. Rocky trotted after him, and I let them go because I didn't know what else to do.

"Well?" Wynne asked intently. "Did Brother Genitivi find the Urn?"

"He found something, all right," I said, and sketched out our discovery, and subsequent ambush, with some embellishment from Leliana.

"And then Latitia leaped gracefully out the open window in daring pursuit-"

"No, I didn't. I fell on my arse."

Leliana drew in her breath for a retort but I held up a hand, having spotted a gray wolf carrying a brace of rabbits in its mouth as it trotted out of the forest. "Morrigan," I called, "come see me when you've changed. I have a present for you."

She perked up her ears, and loped into the barn to dispose of her rabbits. I noticed that the playing children ducked out her way as she passed, paying respect to the only one of them who had kept their wolf.

"So we are on to Haven now?" Wynne asked, bringing me back on task.

"Via Redcliffe, yeah," I said. "The map shows Redcliffe's on our way, so it should work out nicely."

She sighed heavily. "Not looking forward to the Frostbacks in autumn."

"Autumn?" I squinted up at the blazing hot sun. "I thought autumn is cooler."

"It's already waning summer, and autumn comes early in the mountains," Wynne explained. "And it's been some time since these old bones slept in the snow." She sighed again.

Morrigan strode out in her human skin looking expectant, and I brought her away to sit in the hayloft with me; something told me Wynne wouldn't react so well to a manual that proposed to share her special gift with everyone.

"So actually I have two presents, but the second one is a bit self-serving," I told her as we arranged ourselves comfortably. Downstairs we could smell someone making lunch, and it was luxurious to lounge in the hay while someone else worked. "First, here is a pretty feather."

She took the blue feather with a slight frown, turning it over in her hands. "Where did you get it?"

"A really big bird in the marketplace. It was all blue and red."

She tucked the feather into the knotted braid at the top of her head, where it set off the glossy blackness of her hair. I told her so, and handed over the book in its wrapping.

"Because the only way you could be more badass is if you could wiggle your fingers and put our bones back together," I explained as she unveiled the cover.

To my surprise, she didn't read it right away. Instead she stroked the white leather, tracing the gold embossed lettering with her fingers. She let it fall open and inhaled deeply the scent of the vellum. Finally she said, "'Tis quite fine... a fine gift." She looked up, her eyes strangely defenseless. "Mother did not like for me to have beautiful things. She called them frivolous, and... punished me for wanting them."

I sniffed. "I don't think much of her taste, then. When one leads a rough life, it's no use pining for fancy ball gowns and five-inch heels, but a person can still enjoy nice things. Dwarves think anything worth making is worth making beautiful. Not like elves do, with all those silly curly bits that weaken the structure, but in our own way. Look-"

I held out my arm and unlaced the bracer from my wrist, turning the leather back to reveal the tooled geometric design on the inside. "The outside gets all beaten up, so the pretty part is on the inside."

"Perhaps 'tis a metaphor," she said quietly.

She sat back and leafed through her book some more, looking at the engravings, until she took a deep breath and the mask was back up. "Yes, I believe I can learn from this. Of course, I will need time and practice, the latter of which I am sure you can give me."

I laughed. "Oh yes indeed. If nothing else, you can fix skinned knees and black eyes for the werewolves. I'm glad this one is easier to read than Flemeth's."

She went very still and turned slightly away from me, looking out the window. For an instant her form blurred and shimmered, as though she wished to transform and fly away.

"I'm sorry," I said after a few seconds. "I won't mention it again."

"No." She hesitated. "Warden... Latitia. I have a favor to ask."

"Sure. I owe you one. Several, actually."

"I have penetrated Flemeth's grimoire," she admitted. "Expecting to find spells, maybe potion recipes. What I did find was... Not what I expected."

Something bad enough to creep even Morrigan out? This I had to hear. I waited quietly, though, rather than spook her with too many questions.

"You likely do not know this, living in your hole as you did, but the tales tell of many witches of the wilds, many daughters of Flemeth's. I wondered why I never met any, and now," she shivered. "Now I know why."

"By the ancestors, does she _eat_ you?" I asked, horrified and yet fascinated in a macabre sort of way.

She snorted. "Certainly not. What she does is far worse. She simply waits until her body grows old, and then she takes her daughter's for her own, possessing it."

"Whoa! That could mean all kinds of things," I said, leaning forward intently. "If she's possessing people, it sounds like she might even be a demon, and not a witch at all. That would make her an abomination, wouldn't it?"

"She is certainly an abomination," Morrigan snarled. "Even if not in the way that you mean. Flemeth _must_ die."

I nodded. "All right, I'm on board. But how? She's the freaking Witch of the Wilds."

Her gazed flickered uncertainly, making her look vulnerable. "I do not know. But you have a way of succeeding where others have failed."

"This might have to wait until after the Blight," I said glumly. "I don't know... if she's so dangerous, I don't know if I can justify risking the last two Gray Wardens in a suicide mission against the most powerful witch in the world."

She scowled. "Fine. I suppose there is no set time limit on this. But the end of the Blight is the most logical time for her to strike, you realize. I may well owe my continued existence to her fear of the Archdemon."

"She took a serious risk with an important investment, sending you with us," I said, frowning. "Why?"

She shrugged. "Perhaps she really does fear the Blight and sent me out of self-interest. Perhaps she hoped I would become more skilled and powerful. The grimoire indicates that if the new body is a powerful mage already, Flemeth needs less time to... settle in."

We both shuddered.

"Latitia? Lunch," Leliana shouted, peering up at us through the window from down in the barnyard. I waved in acknowledgment and stood up.

"We'll do what we can," I told Morrigan as I dusted off the bits of hay that stuck to my clothing and hair, then hesitated. "If you were anyone else, I would give you a hug, but you don't seem to like that."

Her lips quirked, almost a smile. "'Tis the thought that counts. Go, I have already eaten."

* * *

The wind changed that afternoon, bringing cooler air under a leaden sky, and between that and Alistair's pensive silence, our camp that night was less than jolly. And the next day, and the next, until I began to wonder if I ought to be doing something more to help him. But whenever I tried to talk about anything other than dinner and campsites, he would shrug and make up some excuse about chopping firewood or digging privies, and run off. So I stopped trying to talk, and let him pretend he was fine, because that was better than driving him away.

Meanwhile, the Wolf Tribe were reaching a fever pitch of excitement over approaching their new home. Every evening saw Alistair peppered with questions about exactly how far away they were, and whether this land was part of the Arling's territory, and would he show them again how to bow to Teagan because they would rather die than offend the new Alpha in his territory.

The youngest especially kept bugging him for advice on fitting in until, one evening, he just shook his head at them all and said, "You want to make friends? I'll show you how to make friends. Go find a sturdy stick, about yea long," and he held his hands about a yard apart.

While they ran off to look, he came over to me and asked, "Do you still have those bits and scraps of leather from when you re-fitted all their armor?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Can I have them?"

Of course I handed them over, glad he was actually interested in something again, and watched while he wadded them up and tied them tightly with twine into a hard ball. When he was satisfied with it, and the kids had brought him a suitable stick, he stood up and walked away from the camp into the road, tossed the ball into the air and hit it with the stick, sending it flying an astonishing distance down the road. Rocky hurtled after it with gleeful abandon, returning it to Alistair with a frantically wagging tail-stub.

"Who wants to go next?" he asked the excited crowd. "I'll throw the ball, you hit it, Rocky'll bring it back. Once you're good at hitting the ball, I'll teach you the rest of the game."

That was a fun evening. Once the concept of "taking turns" was properly drilled into their heads, the boys eagerly took to the game, and their unabashed delight at whacking the ball and watching it fly away was a joy to behold.

"Finally, a way to make proper use of all this empty space," I said to Alistair when he took a break for dinner.

"You should come play, too," he mumbled around his mouthful of beans.

And if I was playing, then of course so was Leliana, and if Leliana was playing then that meant every woman in the Tribe was invited, because by now Leliana had made them all into her very own pets. Sundancer swung at the ball a couple of times, but had to go feed one of her boys before she'd had a chance to get the hang of it, and Clearwater squeaked, ran away from the ball, and could not be convinced to try again.

Nightsong hit the ball her first try, though, straight into the ground where it sent up a great cloud of dirt. The younger girl behind her reached for the bat, but Nightsong grinned fiercely and demanded, "Throw it again!"

"You had your turn, now give the bat to the person behind you," Alistair said.

She responded with a heartbreakingly adorable pout, which was a bit like sandblasting a marshmallow; he blushed to the roots of his hair, mumbled something like "but I guess that didn't count" and threw the ball for her again and again until Firetooth dragged her off.

All together, the journey took almost two weeks instead of the ten days Alistair had expected, because such a large group took longer to feed and longer to make and break camp. When we crested a ridge and the glittering expanse of Lake Calenhad hove into view, almost the entire tribe gave a cry of excitement and ran down the slope directly into the lake, sending up great sprays of water as they splashed about.

Morrigan stared at their frolicking with frank horror until she threw up her hands and stalked off, grumbling, "I try and I try and they _still _persist in being _dogs_!"

Then the splashing ceased as one of the men suddenly straightened up and pointed at something further down the coast, and everyone else stopped to look. The white sails of Redcliffe's fleet of fishing vessels bobbed cheerfully in the light surf, and behind them, the looming castle cast its long shadow across the water.

* * *

_I've been forgetting to thank mille libri for beta duty. Allow me to rectify that!_

_Also thanks to everyone reading this and especially my lovely reviewers. Please bear with me through Redcliffe as I venture outside my comfort zone (you'll see what I mean when we get there)!_


	45. New Territory

Gatekeeper and Swiftrunner formed their people into a column marching three abreast, each row holding hands with adults on the outside and younger ones on the inside. When I raised an eyebrow at this elaborate precaution, Gatekeeper raised one right back and said, "Would you like to spend our first day here apologizing for their mistakes and looking for the ones that get distracted and wander off?"

So it was with plenty of puzzled stares that we made our way through Redcliffe town, past Lloyd's inn and the windmill and across the bridge toward the castle. The bridge caused some difficulty when a few became entranced by the view and brought the whole column to a standstill, and a few others suddenly discovered they were afraid of heights and had to be led across with their eyes fixed on the pavement and Wynne's most grandmotherly voice in their ears, but eventually we made it to the portcullis and found Bann Teagan waiting for us.

"One of my gate guards saw you coming across," he explained, offering a manly half-hug to Alistair and handshake for me. "Who are your friends?"

"Hopefully, they're a new regiment for the army," I said. "They're a tribe we ran into in the Brecilian Forest while we were looking for the Dalish. We freed them from a curse and brought them with us."

"This sounds like a story I must hear," Teagan said with an intrigued smile.

"Maybe over supper?" Alistair asked hopefully, and the Bann laughed.

We settled the Tribe into one of the barracks under the watchful eyes of Redcliffe's quartermaster. Enough men had been lost, either in the search for the Urn or in the undead attack, that the quartermaster was able to move the other soldiers around and free up an entire barracks so the Tribe could stick together. They would be crowded, but they seemed to like that, and they slept piled on top of each other half the time anyway.

"Teagan," I said when Alistair and I had a moment alone with him, "there's some things you should know about these people."

"Oh?"

"They're a bit of a handful," Alistair said frankly "They're likely to have a hard time with rules and authority, at least until they get settled in. Think of them as having literally been raised by wolves."

"I might not have put it so bluntly, but that's the long and short of it," I agreed. "You'll want to deal with them through their own leadership. There's Swiftrunner, who's their leader. I guess 'commander' would be a good word, if you need to give him a title. There's also Gatekeeper. I think that's a title, but he uses it as a name. His purpose is to take care of details, like a seneschal."

"And then there's Firetooth, don't forget him," Alistair added with a grin, nudging me with his elbow. I scowled at him.

"This seems ominous," Teagan said, watching the exchange. "What's _his_ purpose?"

"As far as I can tell, Firetooth's purpose is to be a complete arsehole," I grumbled.

"She's not too fond of him," Alistair grinned.

"He has a title, too, the Striker," I continued, glaring at Alistair. He was enjoying riling me up far too much. "But I'll be arsed if I know what that means. I think it might be literal – as in, he hits things."

"He is Swiftrunner's loaded crossbow," Zevran said unexpectedly, making me jump.

"Sod it, Zev, quit sneaking up like that," I complained and punched his arm.

"It is a bad habit of mine, I admit," he said, unrepentant. "At any rate, I gather the position is related to hunting tactics. It might translate to regular combat as well. Outside of hunting, he is an enforcer of capitol punishment."

"I see," Teagan said, frowning. "I shall take your words as a warning, then."

"Keep him busy, give him exercise and approval, and he is not so bad," Zevran shrugged. "Like a rambunctious dog, yes? I got to know him during training," he added to my inquiring look.

Teagan sighed heavily and sat down at his desk with a thump. "Ordinarily I would be asking a lot more questions, but we're desperate for men. The Horde has moved up to the north edge of the Lothering arling, almost at our borders, and we have soldiers on the roads hunting their raiding parties daily. The main body of the Horde doesn't seem to be moving right now, but that could change any day."

"How is the Arl?" Alistair asked quietly, all humor gone again from his face.

Teagan shrugged. "The same. It is hard to say if he's alive or dead, but... We hold out hope. The castle has been very lonely since you left, without Connor and Isolde. Ser Perth and the remaining knights stay in the barracks, and what servants who survived the demon are grim and quiet."

"You could move some of the w – the Tribe into the castle," I suggested. "Swiftrunner's wife has triplets."

"Maker's breath, the poor woman," Teagan winced in sympathy. "By all means. Shall we invite some of them for dinner? Who would you suggest? Of course, we will serve regular meals to the others; nobody will go hungry. Indeed, we're more in danger of our food going to waste. Harvest is coming soon and we don't have enough men to bring it all in. Your tribe might help there, too."

"How... bad was it?" Alistair asked in that same quiet, intent voice. "Once all the dead were accounted for, I mean. How many were lost to the demon?"

"Many," Teagan said flatly. "Your tribe will have plenty of empty houses to move into. Let's just leave it at that, shall we?"

"Um," I said, looking from one to the other. I didn't want to interrupt the Bann, but neither did I want Alistair dwelling on the dead when he was still so off-kilter from Goldanna. "So... I think we should just bring Swiftrunner and Sundancer inside for dinner. We don't want to accidentally upset their hierarchy by showing favor or whatever."

"Yes, leave him to decide who sleeps where and eats what," Zevran agreed. "They will want to introduce themselves formally, as well."

That's how Teagan's dining room came to be full of werewolves. Well, I say "full" even though there were only three adults, but any amount of werewolves (ex or not) has a way of filling up all the available space. Sundancer brought her diaphanous handmaiden, Clearwater, to help with the nuglets, and we all sat down to dismantle a roasted venison haunch.

"Commander," Teagan said after a few minutes of strained silence, "I would like to extend an invitation to yourself and your family to stay in the castle, for your lady's comfort. She is welcome to bring any of her helpers, or even all the women in your group. There are not so many, after all, and their comfort should be paramount."

Swiftrunner nodded slowly, mulling this over. "Yes. That would be good. This castle is much like the old Tevinter palace where we used to live, and my m – my _wife_ will be safe here."

Sundancer looked up sharply from feeding one of the triplets. "Not if all the other women are in here _with_ me. No. I want Nightsong, Clearwater and Gatekeeper, and nobody else."

Swiftrunner rocked back in his chair, surprised at her vehemence. "I can't bring Firetooth in here," he said, indicating Teagan and the guards on the door with a flick of his eyes. "Not after," and he nodded significantly at Alistair.

"Then leave him in the barracks," she said.

"Without his mate? I can't-"

"Are you Alpha or aren't you?" she demanded. "If he can't hold onto his mate, that's his problem, not yours. I won't need Nightsong all hours of the day. She can go out to visit him whenever she likes."

Sophisticated, debonair Teagan was watching this fiery marital dispute with carefully concealed astonishment.

"I'm sorry," I said to him in an undertone. "She's been under a lot of stress, you know, with the children."

"Yes, of course," he said, and waved. A butler materialized out of thin air. "A glass of port for the lady," he told the man, who was about to evaporate again when I grabbed his arm. The butler stared at my rough, broken-nailed hand on his impeccable uniform with horror.

"You can't give alcohol to a mother," I said sharply.

"But wine is good for them," Teagan protested. "Everyone knows that. It helps with the hysteria."

"It might be good for the _mother_," I said, though I personally didn't agree even on that point, "but it most certainly is _not_ good for the babies. Trust me, if there's one thing dwarves know how to make the most of, it's alcohol and fertility."

"That's two things," Morrigan said from her place at the very far end of the table, where she had been smugly demonstrating her superior table manners after having stealthily sat in on Leliana's lessons to the werewolves.

"What's this about?" Swiftrunner asked with a frown. "What's bad for babies?"

"Oh, anything with alcohol in it," I explained. "Beer, wine, rum, ale, brandy, whiskey, lager, vodka, sherry, stout-"

"I think you made your point," Zevran interposed. "My apologies, but if we have to listen to every name for every alcoholic beverage the dwarves have thought up, we might be here all night."

I scooted down in my chair and kicked him under the table.

"_That's_ mature," Wynne commented dryly.

"Fine, then," Swiftrunner said. "You, Clearwater and Nightsong and nobody else. But you have to choose, you can't have both me and Gatekeeper. That would leave Firetooth in charge."

Leliana's bardic imagination chose that moment to present an apparently vivid mental image of the pack under Alpha Firetooth's leadership. She shuddered.

Sundancer blushed and looked away. "Of _course_ I want you."

"That's all settled, then," Teagan said with an air of relief. "Everyone else stays in the barracks for now, I take it?"

"Yes," Swiftrunner said shortly.

"I have a number of empty houses in the town," Teagan told him. "We can see about settling your people into them, if you like."

"Perhaps tomorrow," Swiftrunner shook his head. "This is our new territory, and tonight we must be together. In fact, we should go now. It's already dark."

Teagan stood up quickly when Sundancer did, to be polite I suppose because Alistair belatedly mimicked him, and the Bann shook Swiftrunner's hand, kissed the back of Clearwater's, and had to settle for smiling at Sundancer because both her hands were full of baby.

"What do you think that was about?" Wynne asked after they left, but a short while later as we filed out of the dining room, her question was answered for her.

Outside in the castle courtyard, every member of the pack stood with their faces turned up to the night sky, joining their voices in eerie, mournful song.

* * *

_Sweet dreams, wolves :)_

_Thank you so much for reading, and especially reviewing – your kindness and generosity is inspiring!_


	46. As Good As It Gets

Rocky shoved his way past me as we lugged our bags upstairs to our rooms, thrust the door to Alistair's open with his nose, and hurled himself onto the bed with a tremendous sigh of satisfaction.

"Shove over, you great lummox." I followed him in and pushed his massive paws out of the way to make room, hopped up and scooted under his head. He shifted his head in my lap, smearing drool on my leg, and sighed again.

"Goodnight, all," Wynne said through the door. "I'm going to look in on Arl Eamon, and then I'm going to have a nice hot soak and read before bed."

"I'm not sleepy quite yet," Leliana said and hopped up on the bed between Rocky's paws.

"How many Blight-fighters fit in one bed?" I laughed and scooted over a little to make room for Zevran who, naturally, could not possibly resist joining two women in bed even if everyone was fully clothed.

"Aw, come on, guys, this is my room," Alistair complained, dropping his bag in a corner.

"There is space for you, my juicy senior Warden," Zevran offered.

He sighed and kicked off his boots, sitting against the headboard with his arms wrapped around his knees.

"I think they'll be fine here," Leliana said, meaning the werewolves.

"Yeah, as long as Firetooth doesn't try to take over Redcliffe by sticking a shiv in Teagan's belly," I rolled my eyes. "But you're right. Redcliffe needs men badly enough to tolerate a lot of weirdness. Pretty soon they'll have more refugees than they can handle, though, I'm guessing."

"If the Horde keeps moving and driving people before it," she nodded sadly. "But if they can get the whole harvest in before that happens, they should be all right."

"So, off to Haven tomorrow, eh?" I said, changing the subject to something more appealing. "I have to say, it'll be nice to travel alone again."

Zevran warned, "We should plan ahead, _carina_. I am not used to your dreadful Ferelden weather, and the mountains are liable to freeze certain very important bits right off."

I grimaced. "Neither am I, I was just getting used to summer and now it's about to be autumn? And Wynne says it'll be practically winter in the mountains. You people have got to get your act together. Pick one season and stick with it, I mean really!"

Unexpectedly, Leliana said, "I have traveled through the mountains once before. I can help us shop for supplies."

She found a quill and parchment in the guest room's writing desk and we began working on a list of things to buy, as much as a way to relax before bed as anything else. Eventually she began to yawn, and Zevran uncoiled himself from the bed and stretched, catlike and languid.

"I believe it is time to retire," he said. "Come, my bluebird, you must be fresh tomorrow."

"Yes, yes, fine," Leliana huffed in mock displeasure, and let herself be led from the room. Her mask slipped, it would seem, once outside in the hall, and a burst of giggles floated in through the door with a cry of "Zevran, you cad!"

"Just Zev, my treasure..." His insinuating voice faded as they walked down the hall.

"Are you going to sleep in Alistair's room tonight or mine, fuzzy doggy?" I asked Rocky, looking down at his great head in my lap. He turned his ears sideways in affront. "Sorry, I meant _fierce_ doggy." He snorted and heaved himself up, and I started to follow him.

"Tisha," Alistair said softly.

I stopped at once and looked up at him. He was still sitting curled up in a ball, resting his chin on his knees, but his eyes had gone so dark and intense that my breath caught. I swallowed past the sudden dryness in my throat and sat back down. "Something on your mind?"

He straightened up, uncurling to shift a few inches closer across the quilt. "I never thanked you for taking me to see my sister. And... for being there to talk me down after. I know I was acting like a child and it can't be easy to put up with me, but you did, so... Thank you."

"Oh!" I said, relieved. "Is that all? You're more than welcome. Really, don't mention it. I wouldn't think of letting you go through that alone, even if you weren't my best friend, and anyway I think you took it really well, you didn't even yell or throw anything and compared to any duster that's really good-"

He held up a hand to stop me, grinning.

"Sorry. Am I babbling? I am. Sorry." I squirmed, absently wiping my damp palms on my trousers.

"Are you nervous? You don't need to be nervous," he said, which was _completely not true at all_ because he was being all serious and heartfelt and we were _in his bed,_ and he moved closer still to rub a hand gently across my shoulders. "I'm not done apologizing, anyway."

"Oh." It did feel good, and I found myself leaning on him in spite of everything, such that when he spoke again, he was talking into my hair.

"You were trying to tell me something important, but I wasn't listening," he said, very quietly. "You keep bringing up Leske and I think now I see why."

"Hmm?"

"You said, you took him in and made him your brother. Right?"

"Right... I mean, he spent a lot of time out and about, visiting other friends and stuff, so I was never as close to him as to Rica. But yeah, if anyone asked if he was family, then I would say yes." I tilted my head to press my cheek against his chest. " I think I see where you're going with this."

"Wellllll... I wouldn't actually want to be your literal brother."

"No, it would be really creepy to feel this way about my brother."

His hand stilled on my shoulder at _feel this way_ and he was silent for a long moment, gathering courage. "So... I just wanted to say," he swallowed, and forged on, "You're a true friend, and the closest thing to family I think I've ever had, and I... love you."

My heart thumped painfully hard in my chest – love? Dusters don't get to _love_. The women wanted to escape, the men wanted to have fun, nobody expected to live past thirty, and love was a luxury we couldn't afford. Feelings went unspoken. People formed bonds, enjoyed them while they lasted, then moved on when one of them died or lost interest.

So, for once, words failed me. I looked up wide-eyed, saw nothing but absolute sincerity in his face, and kissed him.

He met me eagerly, pulling me onto his lap as I wrapped my arms around his neck. There was warmth and welcome and, yes, hunger in his touch, thrilling - until I remembered to fear it. I broke away and pressed my face into his shoulder, pressed my whole body tight against his chest and clung to his warmth in the face of cold dread.

"Are you... okay?" Alistair asked uncertainly, after a few seconds.

"I need... Um." Deep breath. I couldn't put this off any longer. "You should know I don't... I don't like to be touched... Um."

He actually laughed, incredulous. "You. Don't like to be touched. You'd better let go of me, then, hmm?"

I laughed, too, a little shrilly. "No, I mean, like, _down there_. You know."

That stopped him laughing. After a long paused he said, "What, you mean not _ever_?"

"N-not so far, no."

I tightened my grip on his shirt, feeling small tremors deep in my body and trying to stop them before I lost it and started crying and freaking out. _Damn, damn, damn_. Holding my breath, I waited for him to change his mind and kick me out.I felt like I would tear myself apart between wanting to get away from this big man and how badly he might hurt me, and never wanting to let go of him.

_Just say it! Just say you're done with me and let me go!_

"I'm sorry," he said, and stroked my hair.

"...And?" I whispered, still waiting for the other boot to drop.

"Uh, thank you for telling me? Now, before I muck everything up?"

"You're – not mad?"

"No, of _course_ not. I might be upset if you don't stop doing your 'terrified dormouse' impression, though. You're curled up so small, I'm afraid you might disappear entirely."

I giggled wetly and tried to relax a little, stretching my cramped fingers. "Sorry."

He sighed and wrapped his arms more snugly around me. "What do I do now?"

"Huh?"

"I don't know... how to react to this. I don't want to do anything wrong."

"I don't know either. We're both running blind, here."

He nuzzled at my hair, playing with it with his fingers."Can I ask why? You don't have to tell me," he added quickly when I tensed again.

"It's stupid. It's just stupid," I growled. "I should be over it by now."

"Don't say that," he soothed. "There are old Templars in the cloister where I grew up who jump at every loud noise. There was one who used to faint at the sight of blood – he saw his friends killed by a blood mage. Boiled them from the inside out. Nobody calls him weak."

"I _want_ to be over it."

"Ah, well, that's another matter."

"It's the same thing as what got my knickers in a knot back in the Tower, remember? That Valeska arsehole. Rica's customer, twelve years old, blood everywhere." [_A/N: Chapter 23, "Secrets"_]

"Got it." His arms tightened slowly until finally he said, with an attempt at casualness, "So, we're going to Orzammar at some point, right?"

"He's already dead," I said, amused. "Some sort of spotted-dick disease. _Not _from my sister, he started going to a cheap whore down the street after Rica told him he wasn't welcome anymore."

He snorted. "I'm torn between feeling it's a fitting end, and wishing he were still alive for me to feed to the darkspawn."

"You wouldn't do such an awful thing-"

"Sure I would."

"-to the darkspawn." I lifted my head and grinned at him.

"Ha! You have a point." He looked at me for a moment, expression unreadable, then gave me a chaste kiss and let me go, leaning back on his hands. "Don't let me keep you up late, if you want to go to bed."

"Oh." I frowned a little, confused, and slid down off the bed. Rocky padded over to stand by the door expectantly. I paused with my hand on the doorknob and looked back at Alistair, his bronze eyes dark in the flickering shadows from the fireplace.

"You were going to ask me to stay, weren't you," I asked quietly.

He flushed and looked down at his hands, a clear enough answer.

"I can stay! We both know what you're gonna do after I go." I pounced on the bed, grinning, hopeful despite every nerve jangling _what if what if what if he's lying_. "You don't have to do it _alone_, do you? I can help!" I let my hand drift up the muscle of his thigh, worried he wouldn't catch my meaning but too shy to put my proposition into words.

He tensed under my touch, eyes widening, and sputtered, "What? I wasn't going to – well maybe, but – I would feel like I was taking advantage if you – and I didn't -"

"It's okay, really! I can do this," I insisted. "I _want_ to do this. I don't – I don't want to be scared anymore."

"Oh," he said, softening. "Well, when you put it that way..."

* * *

"Lovely Wardens," Zevran said when we came down to breakfast. "You look insufferably smug. I take it you slept well?"

"Yes," I said serenely, and buttered a roll while Alistair hastily gulped down a glass of water to cover his blush.

Zevran bent his head close to mine and murmured, "I will expect delicious details later, but before our lovely bard joins us, I have most interesting news."

"Oh?"

"As it so happens, she is a lay sister, _not_ a fully ordained member of the Chantry," he said gleefully. "That means she has taken no vows."

"So?"

"No vows... _of chastity_," he clarified with a wicked grin.

I sighed and picked up another biscuit. "Can't you just seduce one of the serving wenches or something?"

"Oh, I did," he said casually. "But Leliana is much more intriguing than a night's idle amusement in another man's pantry."

"Andraste's sword, Zevran!" Alistair grimaced. "I'll never be able to look at the food here the same way again."

"Come now, don't be so – Ah! Here she comes." He leaned back in his chair, draping himself elegantly over its back to show off his flat stomach and sleekly muscled shoulders.

"Good morning," Leliana said sleepily, rubbing her eyes. "Ooh! Sausages!"

* * *

_Abundant thanks to the kind mille libri for beta help and hand-holding, and to all my readers for your attention and good vibrations. This was was really hard, so please be gentle! _

_(That's what she said.)_


	47. Haven: Uphill Both Ways

"Where's Wynne?" Alistair asked the room at large as he piled bacon on his plate.

"She's finishing her examination of Arl Eamon," Leliana explained. "She did something last night and wants to see what happened."

Shortly thereafter, Wynne trudged downstairs looking tired and discouraged. She filled her bowl with porridge and started to sit down, then muttered, "What the hell," and added two generous spoonfuls of honey and a dollop of cream.

"I take it whatever you did, didn't work," I said, finally breaking the silence after she had seated herself and had a few bites.

"Oh, it worked all right," she said grimly. "It was a diagnostic. He's dying."

Alistair stiffened, gripping his cup until I thought he might break it; I pulled his hand off it and held it in mine, and tried not to look reproachful as I asked Wynne, "We knew that already, didn't we? Hence the spell."

"We had hoped the spell would work perfectly, that it would preserve his body while keeping his spirit anchored to it, ready to come back should the spell be broken. His body is fine, but his spirit is beginning to drift through the Fade," she explained. "I added some reinforcements, as best as I knew how, but... It would be good for us not to dawdle on our way."

"Then let's go," Alistair said and stood up, sandwiching the last of his bacon into a biscuit. "We'll pack our things and meet at Bodhan's wagon, all right?"

"I can go tell him to get ready if you'll grab my stuff," I suggested as I wrapped a few sausages in a napkin and stuffed them into my pocket. "It's all still in your room."

"Thanks." He bent slightly to kiss the top of my head, and I caught him for a quick hug before we parted ways.

"It'll be all right. Genitivi knew what he was doing," I told him. He nodded mutely, and I let him go to follow Leliana and Zevran up the stairs, turning to leave by the front door myself.

Wynne called me back. "Latitia, a word?"

I looked at her curiously and she gestured for me to come back to the table and sit down, which I did with no small amount of worry, despite her benign smile. "What can I do for you?"

Her smile broadened, almost reaching her eyes. "You're quite taken with each other, aren't you?"

I laughed ruefully. "Is anyone really surprised, though? Nice, young, lonely, love-starved guy like him?"

"And attractive," she added with a wink.

"Ha. I was trying to explain why _he'd_ like _me_. The reverse hardly needs explaining." I slid a little lower in my chair and wondered what she really wanted.

"He's also the son of a king," she said, and now her eyes took on a subtle edge as she watched for my response.

A scowl flashed across my face. Evidently that wasn't a secret anymore. What happened to 'I never tell anyone' and 'I want people to like me for me'?

"I know. Where are you going with this?" I asked shortly. "Only you were just saying we should get a move on."

She put down her spoon and sat up very straight. "Fine. Then I will cut to the chase. I wanted to ask you where you think this is going."

I snorted irritably and looked away to hide my expression. I didn't know, how could I? We might all die tomorrow. He might even get tired of me before then. For her to ask felt unfair – noble hunters were the only dusters who even tried to make plans.

She went on to elaborate, explaining gently, "Alistair is a fine lad, skilled in battle, but quite inexperienced when it comes to affairs of the heart. I would hate to see him get hurt."

I felt my cheeks flush, and flared, "Oh good, I'm glad you said that. I was planning on flaying him alive and eating his heart for dessert, but now that you've said that, I won't."

"There's no need to be sarcastic." She sat back and tucked her hands into her lap, drawing her dignity around her like a shield. "I am, after all, here to help you stop the Blight, and he is not just the son of a King but a Gray Warden, the _senior_ Gray Warden. You both have responsibilities that supersede your personal desires. I feel it is _my_ responsibility to watch out for him-"

"_I_ will watch out for him!" I banged a fist on the table, making the silverware jump. "Don't talk to me about responsibility – _you_ left your students behind so you could have a _grand adventure_ with the Gray Wardens."

A wash of pink spread across her cheekbones and she snapped, "What use could I be to them, if all of Ferelden is swallowed up by the Blight because I left our fates in the hands of an innocent young idealist and a casteless dwarf? Oh yes," she added at my surprised look, "did you think my dwarven studies were limited to physiology? I know what 'casteless' means, even if _he_ doesn't."

I drew back, taken off-balance. "He knows. He doesn't care. And anyway," I went on, trying to recover some control of the situation, "Duncan liked me, and Alistair does too, so I don't care what you think you know."

"I know more about love's enchantments than I care to admit," she said quietly. "Enough to know that a woman might gain the approval of men in a number of ways... ways that do not mean she is suitable to lead a nation to victory."

I stared at her in shock, tried to speak but couldn't, my mouth as dry as dust. I tried again and whispered, "You think I screwed Duncan to get recruited. You think I'm a whore."

She spread her hands. "I think you were desperate. Still are desperate. And I have grave concerns about your intentions-"

"So what if I _am_ a whore!" I stood up with a jerk, knocking my chair over backward, shaking with anger and shame. "My sister is! My mother is! How dare you insult them for having the strength to do what it takes to survive! You've never been there, you don't know _anything_!"

"I know enough-"

"No! You don't! Your whole life, you've had three meals a day for _free_. You've had a safe place to sleep every night, and Templars to watch over you. You think mages are persecuted? At least, if someone kills a mage for _fun_, it's considered murder and not _pest extermination_."

I turned my back on her and stalked toward the stairs, but paused, my hand on the door.

"Wynne," I said, and was pleased and a little surprised that I sounded calm and professional. "Considering the importance of the Arl's survival, the delays we will likely encounter in our search, and your stated dislike for sleeping in snow, you will stay behind and care for him. I'll let Teagan know you will be his guest for the foreseeable future."

She sucked in breath for a retort, but seemed to think better of it and let me go in silence. When we trooped back through the dining area with our bags to leave, she had gone.

"Is Wynne not coming?" Alistair asked, looking around for her as we left through the great gates.

"Nope," I said. "She's going to stay and help take care of the Arl."

"Don't we need her as a healer?"

"I have perfect confidence in Morrigan." I waved up at the whirling black shape in the sky. Her bags were already in the wagon.

"But-"

"Alistair, she called me a whore and told me to keep my claws off you. It's safer for us both if we aren't stuck in close proximity for a while."

He goggled at me in disbelief. "She didn't!"

"She did."

"Did you tell her you _aren't_-"

"No," I snorted. "It's none of her business. I'm not going to defend myself to her."

"Well done, _carina_," Zevran said from behind us. "How short-sighted of her to insult the oldest and most honorable profession."

* * *

Bodahn brought his wagon, but only half-filled and with a completely different stock than his usual. Medicines, lowland herbs, and spices made up the majority, items the mountain people would most likely be unable to get for themselves, and which weighed the mules down as little as possible.

We rolled out under bright sunshine, moving at a good pace with the light load, and passed over rolling pastureland dotted with brown cows. The good weather held out for long enough to get us to the foot of the mountains, where the wind turned blustery and whipped leaves from the trees over our campsite.

"Yes, yes, we see your point," Zevran shouted up at the scudding clouds after the wind nearly snatched his dinner bowl from his hands. "Summer is ending, winter is coming. Next shall a single crow perch overhead, cawing ominously?"

"What the-" Alistair's exclamation of surprise came from the wagon, where he had just retrieved his tent from the baggage.

I grinned to myself, watching him shake it out and try to figure out why it had suddenly become so large. When he finally dropped the tent in a heap and stood scratching his head in confusion, I explained what I'd done that day during my turn to rest in the wagon. "I sewed both our tents together to make one big tent. Now you and Rocky and me can all share a tent, when the nights get cold up in the mountains."

"You _sewed_ – but – what about privacy," he stammered, blushing to his ears.

"I'm sure you'll turn your back if I ask you to. You wouldn't want me to be _cold_, would you? I might get sick."

"She's got you there, my friend," Zevran chuckled, and cast a glance in Leliana's direction. "A shame I never learned to sew properly."

We reached the last village of any size marked on our map the next day, our progress impeded by huge flocks of fluffy sheep crossing the road with unhurried inexorability. Their protectors growled at Rocky, slim black-and-white sheepdogs showing little regard for their own safety - or even for the laws of physics - as they promised a terrible death to the huge Mabari if he threatened their sheep.

The human inhabitants proved much friendlier, especially after realizing we were customers. In short order, we had new, thick woolen bedrolls and had augmented our rain cloaks with rich shearling jackets to wear underneath. It was still too hot during the day to wear them, but I held the soft fluff to my face and rubbed my nose in it, cold weather suddenly a less frightening prospect.

Bodahn rented a farmer's barn and left his wagon in it, and we entered the mountains in earnest the next day with our gear packed on ours and the mules' backs. After that, our progress slowed to a painful crawl. Knees and calves protested the continual slope, and the mules made their unhappiness known by insisting on breaks every half hour or so.

It got colder, too. During the day it wasn't so bad, the physical labor of climbing the steep slope keeping me warm, but in the evenings I would shiver and shiver, and slept rolled in a surly ball between Rocky and Alistair, too uncomfortable to take any advantage of my victory over our sleeping arrangements.

In the third night, it snowed.

I might have been appalled, maybe thought it a fungus or something, but Leliana had done her best to explain this frozen water in advance. So instead I amused myself by blowing on the crystals and watching them melt under my breath, until Alistair managed to scoop up enough of the thin white layer on the tents to make a ball, and lobbed it at my back. I saw its shadow at the last second and ducked, so instead of splattering harmlessly on my shoulders, it smacked into the back of my head and immediately began to melt down my neck.

"Maker, I am _so_ sorry!" Alistair ran over and tried to brush the snow off, succeeding mostly in making it stick to my hair.

"Oh!" I cried, spluttering with indignation. "Oh, I am _so_ going to get you for that! Just you wait!"

I was plodding along that afternoon, plotting revenge, with my hands in my pockets and the hood of my cloak drawn tightly around my face, when the narrow footpath suddenly flattened out into one of the incongruous little plateaus that made such excellent campsites. We'd just had time to realize this one was bigger than most when an armored guard stood up from his place beside a small stove, where he'd been warming his hands. He thrust the flat of his greatsword's blade out in front of Alistair, who jumped back from it, his hand coming to rest on his sword hilt.

"You have no business here," the guard ground out. He let his sword point drop and stalked forward to bar our path himself, his stance openly aggressive and his bright blue eyes narrowed to fierce slits. There was something wrong with those eyes: Too bright, too reflective, and for a moment I wondered if they glowed in the dark. But of course not, that was silly.

Bodahn bustled forward, leading his mule. He held out his hands in a peaceful gesture and began the ruse we had worked out together. "Good ser, forgive me for bringing armed mercenaries into your beautiful village. The road is dangerous and I hired them to guard myself and my boy. Think nothing of them, I beg you."

The guard eyed Alistair suspiciously, then let his eyes flick over Zevran, Leliana and myself. Those creepy eyes lingered just a bit too long on Morrigan, who lifted her chin as though daring him to comment on her attire. His lip twitched upward, a hint of a contemptuous sneer as he dismissed her and the rest of us as no worthy threat, and turned back to Bodahn. "Why did you bother? There is nothing for you here."

"Oh, but I had heard so much of your excellent... wood carving," Bodahn improvised with a glance over the man's shoulder to the lamppost further up the path; its curved spar was decorated with a simple, yet powerful series of pyramidal spines. "I brought herbs and medicines, and delicious spices to trade. Pepper? Cinnamon? Hmm?"

The guard pursed his lips, looking disappointed at the lost opportunity for a fight. "Fine," he growled. "You may go to the trading post, but do not wander about. We do not appreciate you lowland folk staring at our home as though it were some sort of zoo."

He threw himself sulkily into his chair and thrust his long legs out toward his stove, apparently done with us. Bodahn glanced at me; I shrugged and gestured for him to go ahead. We had passed the guard and were on our way up the lighted path when he called out a warning.

"If you value your lives," he said with a feral grin, "you will be well out of here by nightfall."

"Yes, ser, thank you," Bodahn bobbed his head in a merchant's obsequious bow and scurried on up the hill.

"Did it just get a lot colder up here, or is it me?" Alistair muttered.

"They are hiding something," Morrigan said, sounding intrigued despite herself. "That man stinks of magic. Can you not smell it?"

"A mage?" Alistair asked sharply, looking over his shoulder at her.

"Not at all. Something... new."

We emerged into the village, the light dusting of snow outlining the heavily timbered houses, built snug against the winter's bite. A few small kitchen gardens were rusting quietly under their blanket of frost, the rounded tops of pumpkins rising above the dead vines like bald heads surrounded by wispy, graying hair. An old ox munched hay; a few chickens pecked and scratched. There was no other sound.

"Well, this is creepy," Alistair said, uncomfortable in the silence.

We passed several dark cottages until we came to one with smoke rising from its chimney, and Bodahn knocked on its door. "Hello? Is this the general store?"

The door opened a crack and a heavyset man stared out at us warily. "Aye? What do you want? _You_ ain't from around here."

Bodahn chattered enthusiastically with the man, showing him samples of his wares. The shopkeeper was interested in a few of the items Bodahn had brought, and our dwarven companion invited him to come outside and look into his saddlebags. The rest of us stood around feeling bored and awkward. I decided to look around inside a little, and see if the shop had anything we needed; catching Alistair's eye, I motioned for him to stay and keep pretending to be a bored mercenary, and slouched unnoticed through the half-open door.

Inside was a pretty ordinary general store, selling everything from nails to flour. I kept my hands clasped behind my back to keep from touching anything, lest I leave fingerprints in the sooty dust eminated from the badly-ventilated fireplace. Its piney smell filled the room, a scent I normally liked because it meant warmth and comfort, but it was much too strong and I sneezed.

The sneeze cleared my nose and I caught something else. A sick, metallic scent as of putrefying flesh. Did the man also sell meat? We probably didn't want to eat anything that smelled so bad, but maybe he had fresher stuff for sale. I padded silently into the back room, through a heavy door that kept the heat of the fire out. This room was much colder, a good storage space, though not good enough. It reeked, and I held my breath, glancing around quickly before deciding nothing in here could possibly be edible, and started to turn away.

A glitter of steel caught my eye, and a scrap of red tunic.

With a gasp of horror, I darted across the room to the corpse lying in the corner. The man had been beaten to death and dumped here, on top of bones and other scraps of humanity that showed he was not the first. I squinted in the unlit room at the device embroidered on his sleeve – a red tower. A knight of Redcliffe.

I backed away from the body, careful not to step in any of the blood, though it looked quite old and dry, and slunk outside, cringing at the marks I left in the dirty floor. Hopefully the shopkeeper wouldn't notice a new set of prints. I slipped out through the front door and sidled up behind Alistair, laying a hand on the small of his back for reassurance and forcing myself to return his smile.

Bodahn and the shopkeeper concluded their deal, taking payment in the form of old gold coins as the man adamantly refused the removal of any of their handmade goods from their hometown. As soon as the Havenite's back was turned, I stepped forward and whispered into Bodahn's ear, "We need to get out of here as soon as possible."

He gave me a startled look, but nodded, waving farewell to the shopkeeper. As soon as we had moved out of earshot, he asked quietly, "Care to tell me why the sudden departure?"

The others perked up their ears and listened, too, as I said tersely, "They're killing everyone who comes looking for the Urn. There's a pile of dead knights in the back of his shop, and I'll bet you my weight in gold that he's not acting alone. This whole village is a death trap."

"But what about Genetivi?" Alistair asked with a worried frown.

"What about the Urn?" Leliana added.

"It's as much as our life is worth to ask about them openly. We'll come back here after dark," I decided. "Leliana, Zevran, and me. If Genetivi's still alive, we'll find him and get him out of here. If not, well... I think we'd better come back with an army. I don't know about you, but I don't feel like fighting every man in this village, all by our lonesome."

* * *

_It's always struck me as bizarre that Wynne would be so friendly and nice to Alistair, and so distrustful and patronizing to the PC Warden, even when the Warden has been Lawful Good throughout the entire campaign. This chapter's conversation with her was my attempt to give a reasonable explanation for her seemingly baseless prejudice. (Other than that she wants that hot hunk of man-meat for herself, of course!) Please forgive me if it came off as unfair to her, I meant it as completely the opposite._

_Special thanks to mille libri for beta help! _


	48. Silent Night

On our way out of the village, we heard the piping voice of a very young boy singing. This was the first sign of anyone in the village at all, aside from the guard and the shopkeeper, so I went to investigate, Alistair trailing along after me. The others stayed to guard Bodahn. We found the little boy sitting on the frost-browned grass behind his cottage, playing with something small in his hands and singing to himself about a certain "Bonny Lynne."

"I like that song," I said quietly from some distance away. "You sing it really well."

He jerked his head up and half rose to his feet as though to run away, but hesitated, peering at me with curiosity. "Who are you? You're not from around here."

I motioned for Alistair to stay where he was and not frighten the boy with his hulking armored self, and walked casually closer, sitting down on the grass myself a few paces away from him. "I'm Latitia. We were just trading some spices at your shop. Your village is cozy. You must love living here."

He scowled, plopping back to the ground and resting his chin on his hands in comical disgruntlement. "It's _boring_. I don't get to do anything fun. Soon I'll be old enough to go up the mountain, though, with all the men."

"That's a shame. I guess there aren't any other boys to play with, huh?"

"Nope. Well, there's Thom, but he's two." He sighed theatrically. "But I play by myself. I went exploring today, 'swhy I'm not in the Chantry with everyone else. I _found_ something." He eyed me sidelong, gauging my reaction.

Obligingly, I leaned forward in exaggerated interest. "Is it something cool?"

"Yes." He smiled shyly, proud of whatever it was he'd found. "Do you want to see it?"

"Very much. I won't tell anyone, I promise."

There, that did it. Secrets are much more exciting when shared, a piece of irony that had always amused me as gossip flickered through Dust Town at the speed of speech. The little boy scooted closer across the ground, incidentally grinding mud into his trousers in a way that would surely exasperate his mother, and held out his hand to show me a small, dirty object in his palm.

It was a finger bone. A _human_ finger bone.

"Hey, that _is_ cool!" I said with feigned delight, hoping the nuglet didn't know what it was. "You know, back home we have lots of games we play with bones. We call them knucklebones. Would you like me to teach you?"

He nodded solemnly and handed me the bone. I used the tip of my pocketknife to scratch numbers onto the surface of the bone and showed him what I'd done. Of course, the game was usually played with the squarer nug's ankle bone, but this would do. "Now, the simplest game is just you throw the bone, and then I throw the bone, and whoever gets a higher number wins."

He scowled again. "That's boring."

"Ah," I smiled at him. "For the discriminating gamer, we have Down The Shaft..." And I sketched the game board out onto the dirt, showing him the more complex game.

We'd played a round or two when Alistair finally said with a hint of impatience, "Didn't we need to be on our way?"

The boy cast him an irritated look, and I said, "Don't mind him. You know how big people are. So boring."

"He looks very strange," the boy confided. "You do, too," he added with youthful honesty.

"It's true," I admitted. "Do you get a lot of strange people visiting?"

"Sometimes. Lots more lately. A man or two will come in and say they're looking for something, but they don't talk to me. Then they go into the shop and they don't come out."

I shook my head in disgust. "See what I mean? Big people are boring. I didn't see anyone else here today, though, so I guess we're the only visitors here."

"No," he said thoughtfully. "I think that other man is still here, the one who came with all the books. My mama took some food to him just yesterday."

"Really?" I asked, trying to sound only mildly interested. "I wish I could have said hello."

The boy shook his head. "You can't. They would get awful mad if you went into the temple, and then they would kill you."

"That's too bad." I stood up, dusting off my trousers, which were now damp with snow. "Well, it was really fun playing with you, but my friends are waiting for me."

"Bye," he said, and turned back to his new toy, ignoring me completely as I left.

"Found out where Genitivi is," I muttered to Alistair as we jogged to catch up to Bodahn and the others. His chainmail jingled, the cheerful sound incongruous in the ominous silence.

"Nice, where?"

"Chantry. I think it's 'up the mountain,' or at least _something_ is – the kid says that's where everyone was today."

He nodded, and we rejoined the others. Bodahn bobbed and beamed at the guard, who made a dismissive shooing gesture at us, his eerie eyes watching us as he receded into the distance.

When we judged we were a safe enough away from the village, we struck out from the path and made a cramped, uncomfortable camp in a washed-out ravine, in the hopes that the stone walls would protect the campsite from being discovered by the Havenites. There we ate a cold supper while we waited for the sun to set.

"I don't like you three going out by yourselves," Alistair said unhappily between bites of mutton jerky. "It feels cowardly to go about things this way, and it's even worse that I have to sit here and hide while you put yourselves in danger."

"If you and your noisy armor come along, we're going to find ourselves in the middle of a war," I pointed out. "Morrigan can come if she wants, I suppose, but then that leaves _you_ alone with Bodahn who, we also need to think about." I tipped my hat at my fellow dwarves, who nodded back with a grateful smile. "They're here because of us, we can't leave them alone in hostile territory."

"Oh." He thought about that, frowning. "I don't need Morrigan to baby-sit me, though, not if I have Rocky."

"And I would much rather go for a night flight than watch your burly man-child pout all night," Morrigan put in, so that was that.

A few hours later and the sky had darkened, the stars beginning to glitter in their mysterious and unsettling way – I still hadn't forgotten Duncan's explanation of them as "giant fireballs a long way away" and didn't like the idea of one finally succumbing to gravity and falling on us, even though Alistair insisted that hardly ever happened.

Morrigan showed us a new animal shape, a barred owl with a sweet, heart-shaped face. Between that, the fluffy feathers, and the soft voice, one might forget that the owl body contained one of the sharpest-tongued women I'd ever met. With a long _hoot_, she launched herself into the still night air, flapping hard for altitude until she was ghosting along above the trees, barely visible even to me.

I took the lead since I had the best night vision, and carried my elven bow into active duty for the first time, strung and slung over my shoulder beside its quiver; Leliana had finally pronounced me an "adequate" archer, at least at close range. We made our way along a ridge, parallel to the sketchy deer path that was the only road into Haven, our progress painstakingly slow due to the layer of crunchy leaves on the forest floor.

"_Brasca_," Zevran muttered, balancing awkwardly on a tree root and looking around him for the next safe thing to step on. I pointed out a small patch of moss, black in the deep darkness under the trees, and he hopped onto it.

We continued our game of leaf-leapfrog for what felt like hours and hours, Morrigan-the-owl swooping past our heads occasionally as though to express her impatience with the pace. Finally we made a wide circle around the guard post and came at last into sight of the village.

The cottages were full of life this time, and smoke billowed out of their chimneys to hang low over the thatched roofs until caught by the unpredictable mountain breezes. I could smell roasting meat and heard someone washing their dishes in the distance. The firelight shining in golden bars across the blue snow transformed the dead village into something otherworldly and beautiful. I tore my eyes away from the view and led us in along the perimeter of the village.

"Did you see any dogs when we were here before? I didn't," Leliana breathed into my ear.

I shook my head, the oddness of that taking a moment to sink in – this was Ferelden. Everyone had dogs. But no dogs meant no barking alarms, and no need to murder the poor animals in order to make our escape.

We came to a well-lit path leading up the mountain; thinking this looked promising, we tried to follow it, but the slope was so steep we had to range almost a quarter of a mile away from town to find a place where we could scramble up unseen. When we did come upon the massive building that could only be the Chantry, Leliana caught her breath in surprise. Rather than the solid but decorative Chantries we'd seen all over Ferelden, with their delicate stained glass and rounded edges, this building was _covered_ in spikes. Wooden buttresses curved in loops on every corner, triangular spikes following all along their length, until the entire building looked like nothing so much as a thorn bush.

"I guess we look for an accessible window now?" I whispered, hoping Zevran or Leliana had more experience with breaking and entering than I. Leliana nodded and I let her take the lead, creeping along behind to a place where one of the thorny buttresses passed close to the wall beside a window.

She braced her back against the wall and her feet against the wood, and pressure-walked up the extra few feet so she could work on the window's hinges. A few interminable minutes passed, punctuated by tiny clinks and scrapes that seemed unbearably loud, and Leliana dropped the hinges' linchpins down for me to catch, followed by the window itself, handed down with great care and a few stifled grunts at the unexpected weight of the leaded glass.

Leliana levered herself onto the windowsill and slipped noiselessly into the room, beckoning for us to follow her once she saw the coast was clear. Zevran gave me a boost and I scrambled ungracefully through, thanking the ancestors for the soft carpet that muffled the scrape of my knees against the floor. Morrigan fluttered after me and perched on my shoulder, her great talons digging in, and I was grateful for the thick leather pauldrons. A moment later and Zevran crept catlike after me, and we were inside.

"This is so exciting," Leliana breathed, so quietly I could barely hear her, but there was no mistaking the gleam in her eyes. I wondered again what she had been doing before the Chantry had taken her into its arms.

We followed Leliana through the building, finding a small record-keeping room and a washroom before we came to a locked door. That seemed promising; I settled down on my knees to work on the lock, and had had just enough time to start getting annoyed by the deadbolt when a tremulous voice inside called, "Hello? Wh-who's there?"

"Quiet," I hissed angrily. "We're rescuing you."

The voice stayed blessedly silent, and moments later the lock grudgingly slid open and we piled into the room, shutting the door behind us. An aging man lay on a filthy blanket in the corner, squinting blindly at us. The room was windowless and the darkness nearly impenetrable, but I could see something horrible had been done to his legs. Ankles should not bend that way.

Morrigan fluttered down off my shoulder and became her usual self, conjuring a tiny wisp of light. "Genitivi, I assume?" she murmured briskly. "Lie still."

"Who – who are - " the injured man stammered, doubtless alarmed by the apparition of a Chasind barbarian apostate in his prison, but decided not to look a gift nug in the mouth and lay very still while Morrigan examined his injuries.

At length her hands began to glow as she sang tunelessly under her breath, tendrils of blue-white light dripping from her fingertips to curl almost lovingly around the shattered limbs. The light dimmed where it touched his injuries, though, and began to turn greenish, sickly and weak. Morrigan grimaced in irritation and repeated her spell; fresh white light washed away some of the sickness, and skin and bone sparkled as it knit, slowly, _so_ slowly.

"The wounds are old," Morrigan growled at last, sounding more wolf than woman in her frustration. "The flesh has forgotten what happened to it, and death has gripped it firmly. This is the best I can do. The leg will heal, but the foot... may have to come off."

"I thought it might," Genitivi said ruefully. "But a foot is a small price-"

"Silence!" Zevran somehow turned an almost-inaudible whisper into a command that could have brought a battlefield to order, and we all turned to look at him, then at the wavering light that shone under the door.

Morrigan instantly dimmed her light, but it was too late, and the door swung open to reveal a heavily-built man in furred robes, a strange portmanteau of traditional Chantry robes and the fierce Tevinter mage robes I'd seen only in pictures. He held no candle, but was followed by a globe of light like Morrigan's, solid and somehow masculine where her own was organic and lively.

For the smallest fraction of a second, we all stared at each other. Then the man raised his hands and opened his mouth to begin a spell, and Zevran pounced. Blood sprayed across the room, spurting from the man's slit throat as he fell backwards, struggling to breathe. The power of his unfinished spell flared loose from his hands, bright orange fire in the night, and went out.

"We should make a prudent exit at this point, I believe," Zevran said, wiping his dagger with care on the man's robes and ignoring Genitivi's horror at the cold-blooded killing. "Ugh, I got blood on my armor again, I _hate_ that."

Morrigan's hard work, while not restoring the brother to his full health, at least gave him one good leg to hop on. Zevran supported him on his other side as the strongest in our group (which really wasn't saying much) and we managed to get him outside without breaking any more of his bones. There was just no way we were going to make it out of here silently, though.

"Morrigan," I whispered after the fifth or sixth time Genitivi stumbled and almost pulled Zevran down on top of him, "This isn't working. Do you think you can bring Alistair up here without him getting caught? We didn't pass any guards on the way here, I don't think this place is as heavily-guarded as we feared."

She nodded, the gesture oddly cute coming from her owl's head, and swooped off. Zevran lowered Genitivi to the ground and sat beside him, chest heaving.

"I am sorry, _carina_," he murmured ruefully. "If I could carry him on my back, perhaps this might go more smoothly, but-"

"But I outweigh you by half," Genitivi finished. "It's I who should be sorry. I owe you my life, but... We aren't leaving now, are we? We can't just leave."

"Did you find the Urn?" Leliana asked urgently.

"Yes!" The brother's eyes glowed with scholastic fervor. "It's here, on this mountain! This dragon cult considers it theirs, though, and when I-"

"Just hold on one gold-picking minute," I interrupted. "_Dragon_ cult? What the hell?"

He nodded grimly. "A high dragon lives on this mountaintop. She makes her lair just beside the Temple, and this cult believes she is the reincarnation of Andraste."

"That's disgusting," Leliana hissed. "Dragons may be beautiful and powerful, but they are _not_ the bride of the Maker."

"Why would a dragon even allow humans near her lair?" Zevran asked curiously.

Genitivi smiled. "I've written a book on dragon cults, actually, it's quite fascinating – but I can see this is not the time for a lecture. Suffice it to say that the dragon allows her cultists to kill a small number of her many hatchlings, and use their blood to gain inhuman strength and power, in return for the cultists protecting her lair and providing her and her young with food. In the wild, her drakes would do this alone, but the cult enables her to – "

"You had me at 'inhuman strength and power,'" I said. "I'm gladder than ever we're out here, and not engaged in a pitched battle in the middle of the village."

"As am I," Zevran agreed. "Even my prodigious gifts might have been somewhat challenged."

"That's what I like about you, Zevran, you're so humble – everyone shh!" I froze, listening with all my might. Alistair couldn't possibly be here so soon, could he? We were a quarter-mile from the village, so I shouldn't be able to hear any sound from it, and anyway, the soft slithering sound had come from the other direction...

"I hear it," Leliana whispered, and slipped her bow off her shoulder, nocking an arrow with practiced ease. There was a click as of claws on stone, and I imitated her. Zevran drew his daggers and crouched beside us.

With a rattling hiss, a lizardlike creature as large as an ox burst out of the underbrush, its clawed forepaws outstretched and its great fangs bared. Leliana drew and released in a single smooth motion, her arrow striking the creature solidly in the side of its mouth. My own arrow flew wide in my haste and missed its head, but lodged instead in the creature's shoulder, just above a well-thrown knife from Zevran. It squealed in pain but could not stop its leap, and we dove out of its way. It kicked out with its clawed hind feet as it hurtled past, connecting with Zevran's chest; he rolled with it but still the blow threw him into a nearby tree with crushing force.

The creature crashed to a halt, clawing up the ground in its pain and panic as it pawed at it the arrow in its jaw. Its lashing, serpentine tail slapped me in the thigh as I tossed my bow into a bush for safety, drew my daggers and rushed at the creature's exposed back. I'll have a nice bruise to impress Alistair with later, I thought as I sank a blade between the shining scales and into its flank. My second dagger hit a thick scale plate, striking sparks as it skittered sideways without penetrating.

The lizard spun, knocking me away from its back, and stumbled when it put weight on the injured shoulder. Leliana seized its momentary hesitation to fire another arrow, but this one ricocheted cleanly off the glassy scales of its head and flew off into the woods somewhere. The drake – for what else could it be? It must be hunting for its mistress – lunged at me, the closest foe. I ducked the great claws and stabbed upwards, attacking the ribs exposed in its desperate lunge, and buried both daggers to the hilt in its vulnerable underbelly.

I felt the telltale quiver on the end of my main-hand blade that meant I'd struck its heart, but the poor lizard wasn't done dying yet – it clutched convulsively at its injury, rolling across the forest floor and into another tree with _me_ trapped in its claws. It pressed the daggers even deeper into its flesh as it hugged itself in mindless pain and terror, my hands and wrists caught along with them. I curled my knees up to my chest to protect my belly as it thrashed and struggled to throw its attacker off – _believe me, critter, I want off too!_

The panicked thought flashed to my mind even as a sharp crack told everyone in the area that my wrist had broken in the drake's final death throe, and then silence reigned again as it gave up the ghost. I slid down its chest to the ground, shaking, and then Leliana was there, pulling me away from the grasping claws. I yipped in pain when she touched my wrist, and then she was digging the elfroot out of my belt pack.

"Not good on bones," I managed, and she raised an eyebrow at me, then pointed at the shredded remains of my greaves and the bloody scratches on my shins. I hadn't even felt them, and watched in bemusement as she picked bits of leather and cloth out of my skin and smoothed elfroot over the gashes.

"Never fear, I am just fine," Zevran said irritably, pulling himself up the tree to his feet.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Zev!" I looked over Leliana's red head at him, but he seemed all right.

"Me, too," he said, flashing his toothy grin at me. "I missed all the fun. He knocked the breath out of me, and I caught a good crack on the head from the tree, but I seem to be fine. Except for my pride, of course."

"Of course," I agreed blandly. Despite the cheerful words, his body language betrayed his hurt as he slumped against the tree beside me, and I suspected his disappointment was due more to finding himself second-place in Leliana's attention as she kept her full focus on me.

"By all the gods," Genitivi said, and I jumped, having entirely forgotten about him. "_That_ was a sight to see."

"We're pretty awesome, it's true," I nodded, straight-faced.

"We are ridiculously awesome," Zevran agreed. "And we should see if we can take some of those scales. Any rogue would kill for drakeskin armor."

"Literally," I added, and he winked at me before sighing and getting up to begin the gruesome work of stripping the best scales off the dead drake. He was just finishing wrapping the nasty things in his undershirt to make them easier to carry when the sounds of a large man trying to be quiet preceded Alistair by a good five minutes.

"You're getting better at that," I told him when he came into view. "I could only hear you a mile off this time."

"Ha," he said sourly. "Well, I'm here now, reporting for duty as beast of burden. At least I'm good for something – _what the bloody hell?_"

"Oh, right, we fought a drake." I waved a hand at the denuded corpse. "Most of the blood is its, don't worry. I could use a hand with this wrist, though, is Morrigan here?"

"A drake? Maker's breath, Tisha! Are you okay?" He knelt beside me and touched my shoulder and arm, as though afraid he might hurt me but he couldn't help himself.

"Don't touch my wrist," I said. "The rest of me could use a hug."

Obediently, he gathered me up in his arms and cradled me against his chest, careful to keep his hands away from my injuries. I leaned my forehead against his warm shoulder, glad he had left his noisy armor behind because he was a lot more snuggle-able without it, and relaxed a little more when he pulled off my leather half-helm to stroke my hair.

Morrigan fluttered down to the forest floor and returned to human shape, prodding my wrist with a disapproving expression.

"Can you fix it?" I asked, trying not to look.

"Yes," she said absently, and began her spell. Bone itched as it clicked into place, and Morrigan sat back on her heels, breathing hard.

"See? Toldja Morrigan would be a kick-ass healer," I mumbled into Alistair's shearling jacket. "Now give me your jerky. You've always got some hidden somewhere, hand it over."

He grinned sheepishly and dug a thick slice out of his breast pocket, and I chowed down, refueling my body as the healing magic finished its work. My friends leaned on trees and stared blankly into space as they tried to rest. It had been a long night, and it wasn't over yet.

* * *

_More thanks for Mille libri keeping me on track, this time by preventing me from lopping off big chunks of plot in favor of excessive magical philosophy. And to all of YOU for continuing to be ridiculously awesome. =D_


	49. All Hallows

Brother Genitivi's polite but firm voice brought us back before we could fall asleep in the bloody snow. "Miss, I really would recommend we move. There will certainly be other drakes hunting, and they can smell blood from a mile away."

I was up and moving before the last words were out of his mouth – one drake was enough for a night. One drake was enough for a lifetime, frankly. I snatched up my bow and started off towards Bodahn and safety.

"But – where are you going?" he called after me, struggling to his feet. He swayed alarmingly, and Alistair caught his arm and slung it around his shoulders. "The temple is up the mountain. We must go there, tonight! We will not get a second chance!"

"We will go to Redcliffe and return with a whole army at our backs," I said flatly, "and _you_ will be glad to be alive."

"No, you don't understand!" The gaunt, exhausted man was getting so worked up that I was afraid he'd drop dead right here and now. I came back and took his hand, intending to try to calm him down, but he gripped mine and pulled me close to talk, his intense eyes gazing desperately into mine. "The temple _moves_, that's why the Chantry has never managed to pin it down. If we leave now, we may never find it again. A lifetime of research – so many men lost in the search – "

"But it's been here for ages, they built a whole town around it and there's a freaking _dragon_ living in it," I argued.

"We don't know _how_ it moves. What if these cultists move it? What if it somehow _knows_ it's been found and moves itself?" Genitivi's eyes lit with the fires of discourse. "The Tevinter scrolls I found in my archeological dig at-"

"Look, we don't have time to go get an army," Alistair cut him off. "Arl Eamon might be dead already, for all we know."

"Oh, dear." Genitivi's face fell. "I'm so sorry to hear that. Is that why you came?" Then he straightened. "All the more reason to go up tonight!"

"Latitia, please, let us go tonight," Leliana begged. "We have to try. Genitivi is right, we can't risk losing the Ashes, a discovery of this magnitude-"

"Zev, Morrigan, what do you think?" I asked, turning to the silent members of our party.

Zevran shrugged. "It seems a shame to come all this way, only to leave without our prize."

Morrigan gave a snort of disgust. "I thought this entire enterprise a waste of time from the beginning. We can ill afford to chase after ancient shadows and snake-oil remedies. But I, too, feel as though 'twould be better to look now than to waste time _again_ by trying to come back later. At least this way will spare us another useless trip."

My shoulders drooped for a moment before I caught myself and hid my distress. "Fine. Genitivi, show us the way. And for the love of the Stone, you and Alistair be _quiet_. If you bring another drake down on us, you can fight it yourself. I'm done with drakes."

"Understandable," Genitivi murmured, but my admonishment did nothing to dampen his glee.

"I'm sorry I wasn't here," Alistair whispered wretchedly as he began to help Genitivi hobble uphill.

"Eh," I shrugged. "We're alive, and now we have drake scales."

This last leg of our journey took us until the evening stars began to swoop low over the horizon, and Alistair had given up helping Genitivi and slung the man unceremoniously over his back, where he now rode piggy-back like a child and hung on tight when Alistair had to use his hands to help himself climb over steep, ice-slickened rocks. I felt hideously exposed as the trees became shrubs and then nothing but rocks, and we crept along crevices, following Genitivi's silent gestures.

Finally, we bellied up to the edge of a ravine and poked our heads over, and found ourselves looking down at the entrance to a cavern. An iron door adorned with the symbol of Andraste wrought in steel over its face was guarded by two cultists who leaned their their greataxes against their shoulders and tried to stay alert despite the sleepy hour.

I was right. Their eyes _did_ glow. And it was creepy as all hell.

Leliana slid back from the edge and came up on her knees, drawing her bow. I did the same, mimicking her pose; she put her bow down and nudged my right elbow up and straightened my hips, correcting my form. The guards didn't look up. Guards never do.

We aimed. I waited, frustrated at the way the tip of my arrow wavered on and off target and wishing she would sodding hurry up already, until a breeze I hadn't even noticed died down and she let her arrow leap from her fingertips to bury itself up to the feathers in a cultist's throat. To my absolute astonishment, I hit my mark, too, and we found ourselves alone on the mountaintop with two dead cultists.

We slid down the ravine wall on our backsides and scrambled to our feet in front of the doors. Geniviti pulled an amulet out of his pocket, saying, "I took this off the man you killed. It's the key." He caught Zevran's approving smile and grinned back, then slotted the intricately carved amulet into a depression in the door and turned. The doors swung gently open, and we entered, dragging the guards' bodies behind us and using their greataxes to bar the door from the inside.

The cavern interior was beautiful. It was a temple, sure enough, its soaring pillars and arches rimed over in frost and decorated with icicle stalactites. Moonlight filtered through feet of solid ice and wavered coldly over the marble floors. Morrigan ghosted along near the ceiling, seeming to enjoy swooping between the icicles to test her owl form's skill and grace.

"What if we run into the drakes? Or the dragon?" I whispered to Alistair, who frowned and looked around and above us.

"We kill them, I guess," he said.

Zevran was rummaging through the guards' pockets, and he looked up at our exchange. "I suspect the dragonkin are accustomed to the comings and goings of their cultists. Perhaps they will simply ignore us?"

Genitivi tugged experimentally at the guards' red cloaks. "It couldn't hurt to wear these. I imagine they are the uniform."

As the two closest in stature to the tall guards, he and Alistair donned the cloaks, their pleasure at the warm wool somewhat dampened by the sticky deathblood that soaked the collars.

But it would seem that the night's hunt was not yet complete, and the drakes would not return until dawn; we encountered no more of them as we passed through the caverns, except for a pair that were doing something with a clutch of eggs, rolling them gently around inside a cave that radiated heat and a sulphurous smell from its hot springs. The springs' bubbling muffled the sounds of our passage so that we crept by unnoticed, and came to a second pair of huge doors.

These swung open at Genitivi's urging to reveal an even vaster cavern, this one with a wall missing. The broken wall opened directly out into the night air, and as I looked at the size of the gouges left on the floor by a set of gargantuan talons, I tried not to imagine the dragon herself swooping in through that hole.

"Well, hello there, my lovely," Zevran purred, interrupting my staring. "Where have you been all my life?"

"What in sod-all," I began, and then I saw what he was looking at. The dragon's hoard spread across the far wall of the cavern, glittering in the starlight. "Ooooh," I breathed.

"Don't even consider it," Leliana admonished. "The dragon will know if you steal even a penny."

"She will not, she can't count," I said absently. "Look at all that gold!"

"Not worth it," Alistair said grimly, and dragged me after him by the collar. "Ask Teagan for gold if you want some that bad. I've heard what dragons do to people who steal from them."

We reached the other side and entered a corridor, Zevran casting longing glances over his shoulder at the heaps of gold.

"There it is," Genitivi said suddenly.

"The inner sanctum," Leliana whispered in awe.

I didn't know what I expected, but not the humble, almost rustic temple that lay before us. The architecture was totally different, as though the rest of the temple had been built around it later, and this sanctum itself was all that remained of Andraste's own people's construction. Warm brown stone was carved all over with forests, mountains, loving families in their homes and working their own land, elves standing proud beside their caravels, and everything else Andraste had died to preserve. A simple sword and shield crossed each other over the entrance, not pretty but strong and well-made, unadorned tools for an important job.

Leliana ran for the door, her face aglow. An instant before she reached it, flames sprang up before her. Zevran cried out in shock, but before he could even make a move the flames pushed Leliana away gently but firmly, leaving her skin unmarked. The tongues of fire swirled, mounted, and rose into a pillar, forming themselves into the shape of a man.

**Hello, pilgrims.**

The voice spoke at some level beyond words, the meaning impressed into my mind without any need for primitive language. Quick glances at my comrades showed the same look of shock on everyone's face and told me that wordless, soundless voice had "spoken" to all of us.

**You wish to visit the Ashes.**

"More than anything," Leliana said, trembling. There was a moment of silence, and she gasped, her hands flying to her mouth.

Then I was falling, my vision going dark and the world spinning until I found myself drifting in weightless black void.

**There. We may speak privately.**

"Leliana knows more about – _all this_ - than I do," I said helplessly. "Talk to her, or Brother Genitivi, please."

**I am doing so. I am speaking to each of you privately.**

**Why are you here, woman of Stone? You worship Her not.**

"I'm trying to stop a Blight," I told the void. I wasn't sure what to say, and was terrified I'd ruin everything if I said the wrong thing, so I tried to hedge my bets with bland truth. "We need the Ashes to heal a sick man, so we can have his support in defense of Ferelden." Andraste had basically _made_ Ferelden, right? It seemed like a good thing to say, that I was here on behalf of Her nation.

**Why?**

**Why do you care, when the dwarves have hidden for so long, turning your backs on your duty that you might do war upon your neighbors and oppress your own people?**

**Why are you here?**

I tried to hesitate, to turn over my answer, but felt the spirit, guardian, twenty-questions-player, _whatever_ he was push at my mind, reaching out to pluck answers for itself, and so I sputtered out the first thing I thought of. "Because Duncan recruited me. It's my duty as a Gray Warden."

**LIES.**

Pain seared my skull until lights flashed in the void and I gasped for air that wasn't there. "I'm sorry! I don't know what you want! It's true, I swear, Duncan did recruit me, I – I don't know what you want me to say!"

**A duster does not risk her life again and again for ungrateful strangers out of **_**duty**_**, merely because a man forced her to drink poison or die**. **A duster sees a wide open world, and many other people better-suited to the task, and she makes her escape, leaving the warriors to fight in her stead**.

"Screw you! Warrior caste couldn't find their own arses if you gave them a map!" Rage flared in the wake of the pain. I'd had about enough of humans and their gods trying to tell _me_ about dusters. But the "voice" seemed merely amused by my outburst.

**Am I wrong, then?** **Does a duster do all this merely because she has been given an empty title and tainted blood?**

I fell silent, overwhelmed, and when the spirit's cool hand passed over my mind again, it opened something up inside. Images and feelings, vague sensory impressions gushed from the well of my soul and poured across my vision.

_Huddled between the feet of a two-hundred-foot statue of a Paragon in the Deep Roads and eating cave crabs raw, feeling safe again for the first time as the Stone sang softly on my skin._

_The dead silence whose warning I ignored, a tunnel of rot in the Stone that harbored darkspawn. The wet, tearing sound of an axe slicing through leather and deep into the flesh of my belly. The stiffness of dried blood on my clothing as I clung to life and made my way home._

_The weight of the dead man on my back as I carried it to the lava pool for disposal. Bherat's face leered out of the darkness. "It'll be you next, you try that shit again, duster." _

_The corpses of a failed assassination attempt, rotting on stakes outside the palace, a warning to others. The corpses of disgraced warriors, rotting in Tapster's and ale, a warning to others._

"Stop." I struggled to close the door on those memories. "Stop it!"

_A lost forge coming to life under my touch to hum and throb with lyrium blood, and my sorrow that I had to leave it behind, alone in the dark._

_A soaring thaig cathedral whose every graceful line was traced in glowing blue mushrooms. My heart lifting as I turned my face up to bear witness to what we had lost._

_The thrumming heartbeat of this very mountain. The pulse of life within it. The chorus of ancestors whose power shattered the song of the Archdemon during my Joining, silencing it with their own call to arms. To protect what we have, and regain what was lost._

_Everything beautiful under the sky. Grass. Birds. Flowers. Alistair._

**That will do**.

"Wait, what?"

**A single pinch of the Ashes is all you need**. **Maker be with you**.

With a jolt, the world came rushing back and I was standing in a warm room of brown stone. Absolutely, completely, stark butt-naked.

"Come on! Not even my boots?" I asked the air, a little giddy as I shook off the flood of memories.

"Oh, Maker," Alistair groaned.

I glanced behind me and saw Alistair and Leliana in equal states of undress. Alistair flushed beet-red and instantly covered his family jewels with his hands, staring determinedly at the floor, while beside him Leliana was about to explode with excitement. Zevran stood at the edge of the flame barrier, peering in with far more interest than was decent, while Genitivi sat on the floor writing notes furiously. Before us stood a simple plinth with a plain stone jar atop it.

"Leliana," I said softly, "would you do the honors?"

Her eyes filled with tears as she approached her religion's most sacred relic, the ashes of her prophetess and savior. She lifted the lid of the jar, elegant in its simplicity, and looked helpless for a moment until she saw a small leather pouch lying on the plinth that I would have sworn wasn't there a moment ago. She opened the pouch and dropped a single pinch of the ashes into it with exquisite care.

The second she placed the lid back on the jar, the room shimmered, blurred, and we found ourselves fully clothed and shivering in the cold of the cavern. Faint grey light told of the approach of dawn.

"Wow," Alistair said after a long silence.

"That about sums it up," I agreed. "Zev, Morrigan, why weren't you in there?"

Zev shrugged. "He asked why I wanted to approach the ashes. I told him I didn't particularly, and that was that."

Morrigan nodded in agreement from her perch on a rock.

Genitivi was still writing, but he said without looking up, "He told me some of the most fascinating information about the temple's history. Including, by the way, the fact that he's going to move it now, so we'd better go."

At that, a flash of light blinded us all for an instant, followed by an ominous creak from the stone above our heads. When we looked up, the temple was gone, leaving a hole in the cave wall – a hole surrounded by a rapidly-expanding web of cracks.

We bolted for the door, diving through it as the first chunks of stone began to fall. On the other side, we came face-to-face with a dozen shocked drakes, who regarded us with bewildered confusion until cracks began to emanate from the doorway along the walls. Then they leaped into frenzied action, calling to each other in birdlike voices and working with urgency and precision to carry the eggs outside. They ignored us as we ran past, focused on their task.

"But they'll just freeze and die," I said, feeling a sharp stab of guilt at killing the helpless dragonlings inside the eggs.

"Not if the high dragon comes back in time to flame them," Genitivi called to me from where he bounced, undignified, on Alistair's back. "That's why she has flame breath, you know. To warm them. The drakes do, also, to a lesser degree."

"Great, they can set the forest on fire, awesome," I muttered.

We blew through the outer door in time to see a great puff of dust blow into the air, heralding the collapse of the inner cavern.

"_Brasca_! The hoard!" Zevran cried, wringing his hands in dismay.

"I think," I said slowly, "she's gonna notice it's gone. I think she's gonna be pissed. What do you think, Alistair?"

"I think you may be right." He craned his neck, searching the sky, and then his hand rose to point toward the southern horizon. "But I guess we'll get to find out soon enough."

A drake, balancing awkwardly on his hind legs with an enormous egg clutched in his forelimbs, straightened his sinuous neck to look; spotting his mistress, he shot an urgent tongue of flame into the air with a shrill fluting call. The distant birdlike shape gusted answering fire, incidentally boiling away a nearby cloud, and angled her wings to approach.

"Oh sod," I gasped and bolted downhill, following the trail rather than waste time trying to climb out of the ravine it followed. Behind me I heard more drakes calling and shooting off excited spurts of flame every which way, as well as the running feet of my comrades-at-arms.

Visibility wasn't great – the path twisted and switchbacked its way down the mountain. So I really wasn't all that surprised when we rounded a hairpin turn and collided with a pack of cultists, armed and armored, and led by a huge man with an epic beard who was clearly unable to take the destruction of his goddess's home philosophically.

* * *

_Happy Halloween, you crazy kids! Don't forget to throw a fistful of candy corn over your shoulder in honor of our fallen comrades, and to keep the Candy Corn Vampire off your back._

_Thanks to mille libri for gentle but firm beta duty, and to all you guys who took a break from "helping get rid of" the extra candy to read my story :)_


	50. Dragon's Fire

_Profuse thanks to mille libri for particularly patient beta duty on this one! Mildly NSFW content at the end. (Mom, in case you don't know, NSFW = Not Safe For Work = X-rated.) I love you guys! I hope you like it!_

* * *

"You!" Beard Man bellowed, turning purple with outrage and pointing a mailed finger at us. "What have you done?"

"Nothing! I have no idea what you're talking about." I held up my hands in an expression of bewilderment, trying to buy time for Alistair to disentangle his shield from Genitivi, who was babbling something about "Kolgrim" and how he was the dragon's liaison.

"Our Goddess' temple is collapsing!" Kolgrim accused.

"That?" I looked up at the dissipating cloud of dust and the hardworking drakes. "It was like that when we got here!"

He wasn't impressed. "You invade our home, kill our priest, destroy our temple and you _dare_ get cheeky with _me_!"

"Well, when he puts it that way I feel kinda bad," I muttered to Alistair. "Ready?" He nodded.

"Destroy the intruders, my brethren! Andraste will grant us victory!" The cultist leader was exhorting his men. His beard bristled with righteous fury as he swung his absurdly long greatsword off his back and thrust its tip into the air, then whirled dramatically to point at us. Behind him, his men howled and charged, no thought or tactics but pure barbaric rage propelling them up the ice-slick stones of the path.

I ducked the first wide swing of that massive sword, horrified at the way Kolgrim handled a five-foot blade as though it were a mere dagger, and tried to back up to join the defensive line Alistair and Rocky formed to give Leliana space for her archery and protect the defenseless Genitivi. But when I rolled away from Kolgrim's second sweep and the blade embedded itself a foot deep into the frozen earth; I had a momentary vision of what that could do to _me_ and immediately gave up trying to hold my ground, slashing the straps of the heavy bracer on his left arm as I danced away to get some room.

A spear of greyish stringy stuff flew over my head just as the sword's tip whistled past, and splattered across Kolgrim's face. It spread out like a net and tangled itself around the arms and legs of the men behind them, sticking like glue. I looked behind me, startled, and beheld an emerald green spider as big as a bronto. It waved a pedipalp at me in a friendly sort of way, then launched itself up the side of the ravine, skittering along the steep slope to spit acid into the enraged knot of cultists.

Kolgrim roared with frustration, tearing at the webbing stuck to his mighty beard, and Zevran and I both chose that moment to try to put some holes in him. Zevran got the tip of his slender Crow dagger down beneath the plate that protected his left arm even as I thrust my own up under the skirts of his chainmail to leave a long, deep gash across his thigh. That was all we managed before his left arm tore free and his mailed elbow cuffed me across the top of my head and smashed Zevran off his feet entirely and into the opposite wall of the ravine.

Dimly aware of Leliana's arrow taking a man in the eye and the screams of rage and pain as Morrigan's venom did its grisly work, I threw myself backward and away from Kolgrim's descending blade. My foot struck a stone and I rebounded off it to gouge the inside of his wrist while he was still committed to the blow and couldn't dodge, slicing the remaining straps and letting a gout of blood splash across the ground along with the loose metal plates. To my horror, the pain of his wounds just made Kolgrim grin; he recovered from his swing with impossible speed and jabbed me in the chest with the spiked pommel, knocking me back and giving himself space.

Alistair deflected another cultist's sword, letting it slide across his shield with a screech of metal on metal, and crouched to thrust his sword into the man's stomach and up under his ribs. "The dragon," he shouted as I rolled away from Kolgrin's next swing. "Be ready to run!"

I nodded and, before Kolgrim brought his weapon to bear again, lunged at a redheaded cultist whom Zevran had cleverly manipulated to turn his back to me. The cultist leader growled in frustration as my victim went down with my blades in his ribs. I yanked them free and spun to face Kolgrim again, expecting an attack, but a glow of rapture spread across his face just as a tremendous gust of wind buffeted the ravine.

The great dragon backwinged over our heads, too large to land in the narrow ravine, and finally straddled it with her massive taloned feet sending little avalanches of stone and dirt. Men staggered and fought to stay on their feet as the ground shook and the wind of her landing buffeted us.

"Beloved Andraste," Kolgrim cried, raising his arms up to her in adoration. "Aid your worshipers! Destroy the intruders!"

She tilted her horned head, birdlike, to focus a baleful eye on him. The eye narrowed when it recognized his face, and she snarled with displeasure, her lips peeling back from her fangs, each as long as my forearm.

"No – no, beloved, it was not I who destroyed your lair! It was them!" Kolgrim pointed trembling fingers at us.

She let out a furious scream, revealing a little pilot light in the back of her throat that was ready to ignite her breath and burn us all like so much kindling.

"They came in the night, my lady," Kolgrim explained quickly, color draining from his face in the face of his goddess's anger. "With stealth and trickery! The fault was not ours, we have always protected your lair with our very lives, the fault is theirs!"

She swiveled her head to inspect us; we hid our weapons behind our backs and tried to look harmless. "We are weak, small things, oh great one," Brother Genitivi cried, and fell to his knees before her; after an instant of confusion, we imitated him. "Kolgrim could have killed us easily, had he chosen. We could never have done so great a harm to one as mighty as you."

Maybe it worked, or maybe she didn't care _why_ Kolgrim had failed to protect her lair, only that he had; whatever her reasons, she turned back to her High Priest and hissed, steam jetting from her nostrils.

"Please!" Kolgrim begged, falling to his knees. "Have mercy, we – we will extract vengeance upon these - no! Noooo!"

Unappeased, the ancient dragon dipped her head and snatched him up in her terrible jaws. She ignored his pitiful screams and shook him like Rocky shaking his favorite sock until he screamed no more. She spat him out with utter contempt and turned her gaze on her surviving worshipers.

After the broken body crashed to the earth, for a long moment we all stood motionless, in shock. Then the cultists let out a wail and dropped their weapons to beg her for mercy. She drew in a deep breath, and my friends and I chose that moment to get the hell out of Haven, shoving our way through the panicked men.

Her wrath exploded over the prostrate men and blasted us forward onto our faces. I grunted, skidded along the gravel, tasted blood and sand, and was very grateful that was the sum of my problems as, behind me, the Havenites roasted alive in their armor. Alistair hauled me to my feet, his shield blackened from where it had protected him from the blast, and together we grabbed Leliana, Zevran and Genitivi and ran like our lives depended upon it, because they did.

Nobody spoke, all our breath spent on speed. Zevran grabbed Alistair's heavy shield from him to spare him the weight when his breath grew labored under the effort of supporting the injured Genitivi. I felt a sudden stab of worry and glanced around me for Morrigan, seeing nothing – but what would I even look for? A raven? A wolf? A spider?

A shadow glided overhead as the dragon arrowed toward Haven, smoke trailing from her deadly muzzle and a low, vengeful growl rumbling in her cavernous chest. Just as we raced past the Chantry, it burst apart, destroyed utterly by a column of fire that erupted from its roof. Shrapnel flew everywhere and I registered a gash across my thigh, Leliana's yip of pain and Alistair's muffled cursing, but could do nothing but run.

The village was in utter chaos, some running for buckets of water, others trying to get their most prized possessions out of their cabins before the holocaust was upon them. We turned to skirt the edge of the town, away from the chaos and through the fields. Animals squawked, brayed, and mooed as they stampeded for freedom, and to my surprised delight, Morrigan sashayed out of a barn leading a shaggy mountain pony. Alistair plopped the haggard Brother Genitivi on its back with relief, and we were off.

We passed the abandoned guard post, the heat from the dragon's revenge blistering the backs of our necks, and slowed to a trot as the light of dawn mingled with the glow of Haven's destruction. But when we'd almost reached the campsite, Rocky's angry barking brought me back up to a run, and through the trees I saw a flash of purple wings.

We reached the campsite as the mules screamed, bucking and plunging against the tethers in their terror while the dragon casually uprooted an inconvenient half-dozen trees. Rocky growled his impotent threat; she ignored him as she set down in the clearing and, ravenous after her labors, she thrust out her jaws to devour the closest mule.

Bodahn and Sandal weren't about to sit and watch their mules get eaten, though, and two musical twangs sounded as they fired their crossbows. Bodahn's bolt dug into her chin, where it looked like barely more than a thorn, but Sandal's bolt shimmered with a nimbus of arcane force, and when it struck her, it kept going through scales, flesh, and muscle, and exploded out the far side of her jaw.

She reared back in shock, appalled that something so tiny could hurt her, and cocked her head at us, seeming more confused than afraid. Rocky bayed joyously and hurled himself at her hind leg, where he latched onto her ankle and hung there, like a burr. She shook her leg absently, flinging him across the clearing, and spat an experimental blob of flame at Sandal.

The flame spattered harmlessly over him, causing the anti-fire runes etched into his jacket to flare blue and subside. Sandal calmly slotted another bolt into his crossbow, and the dragon decided she could find easier meals elsewhere. She leaped into the air, beating her sail-like wings rapidly until she caught an updraft and spiraled away.

"Enchantment," Sandal said by way of explanation, waving his evil-looking crossbow once before stowing it safely in his pack and bustling away to comfort his mules. Rocky pranced over to greet me and Alistair with doggie kisses.

"By the Stone, that's not a sight you see every day." Bodahn let out a gusty sigh of relief and walked over to inspect the prints her claws had left, picking his way through the craters from where she'd torn up the trees. He let out a low whistle. "Would you look at that. Two feet deep or I'm a nug's uncle, if you'll pardon the expression, miss."

"I am so tired, you have no idea," I groaned and flopped down on a log. I glanced at Genitivi, who looked green and hollow-eyed. "Though I suppose my troubles are small compared to yours."

He smiled weakly, clinging to his pony's mane for support. The animal had shown no fear in the face of the dragon, and I thought it must have been used to help carry food up to the lair. "It was all worth it, to have seen the Ashes. May I hold them? Please?"

Leliana pulled the leather pouch out of her bodice and handed it to him; he caressed it like a spun-glass treasure, holding his breath as though afraid it would disappear in a puff of smoke if he so much as breathed on it. "They're real," he whispered. "All my research... Here she is, in my hand."

"Is it me, or are they being a little creepy about some dead woman's ashes?" I muttered to Zevran when he sat beside me on the log.

"Obsession has many names, some more socially acceptable than others," he said with a philosophical shrug.

"I'm not very religious," Alistair said, "but I'm not sure I'm happy making fun of people who are."

"Sorry." I turned my attention to him and burrowed under his arm. "You can make fun of me for revering a chunk of minerals, if it makes you feel better."

"No, no. It's a really _big_ chunk of minerals, after all. It's understandable."

I chuckled, then said reluctantly, "We should go."

"But I was thinking of settling down here. Beautiful views, interesting wildlife, friendly locals."

I laughed and heaved myself to my feet to help Bodahn and Sandal load the last of our camping supplies onto the mules.

We trudged down the mountain for a couple of hours, finding that walking downhill wasn't much more comfortable than walking uphill, though we made better time. When we started stumbling over rocks in mid-afternoon, we figured we were as far away from pursuit as we could manage – after all, we would hardly be in any shape to defend ourselves until we'd had at least a nap. Morrigan flew circles overhead to confirm that no vengeful natives were on our tail, and we turned off the main path onto a rough game trail, making our camp on a protruding ledge of stone that guaranteed we could not be surrounded easily.

Tents were slapped together with a minimum of effort, bedrolls tossed inside, boots kicked off and we were asleep, still bundled in our clothes against the mountain's chill. Rocky stayed with Bodahn and Sandal to keep watch for us, since they were freshest.

A few hours later, though, my hunger drove me from the tent and I crept outside carefully to avoid waking Alistair. Bodahn had some pea soup on the boil, rich with salted ham and carrots, and I gladly scarfed down two hurried bowls of the stuff. A sharp-edged wind picked up as the sun dipped behind the mountain and out of sight, but as I watched, the scalloped clouds bloomed with pinks and golds in a glorious display.

"You guys want me to spell you on watch duty?" I asked Bodahn.

"We napped during the early part of the night," he answered with a smile. "You go on back to sleep."

I had no desire to argue with them, and crawled back into the tent, sliding under my blanket. Alistair sighed and stretched, and I felt instantly guilty for waking him. "Sorry."

"'Sokay," he said mid-yawn.

"Bodahn made soup," I offered. "And it's pretty outside. The clouds are pink." I reached out and tugged on the tent flap's tie, holding it open to reveal the flowering sky.

"I snacked earlier. I'm not hungry enough to be worth putting my boots on." He looked at me for a moment, then rolled onto his belly, propping his chin on the folded-up tunic he used for a pillow, and gazed out the opening at the clouds. "The sun has set every day of my life, you know. It's not exactly new to me."

"Well excuse me for-"

"But it is when I see it through _your_ eyes," he added, turning to light up the tent with his smile, brighter than the sun, and slung his arm affectionately across my shoulders.

"Oh," I said in a small voice, and looked back outside at the display. Usually Alistair came into our tent after his watch, when I was asleep, and then I left before he woke up. We hadn't had enough time together like this for me to know what to expect... to know what _he_ expected.

I waited, and the clouds deepened to magenta, with lavender highlights. He brushed his thumb over the nape of my neck, and began to toy with my hair.

"I suppose this is romantic," I ventured.

"I suppose it is." He laid his cheek against his pillow and smiled again, tightened his arm around me and pulled me close to him.

I turned toward him and tucked myself into the curve of his body, soaking up his warmth and comfort. The tent flap fell closed when I let go of it, casting the enclosed space into shadow. He held me closer than usual, pressing my body against his chest so that I felt the muscle flex under the thick woollen tunic he'd slept in, and he purred with pleasure when I softened into his embrace and let my hands glide over his back.

"You know," he murmured against my neck, "This morning was the first time I've ever seen you completely nude. Not quite the circumstances I'd imagined, but still... The image sticks with a man."

_Oh sod._ I was suddenly very aware of the way he was keeping his pelvis carefully separated from mine to avoid intruding the erection, which I was _sure_ he had, upon me.

"Despite wind and snow and dragons, a man does notice a naked woman, doesn't he?" I said, my fingers tightening into fists around handfuls of his shirt as I tried to decide what to do. There was a big difference between doing something once, and actually making a habit of it. He might develop expectations, ones I might not be able to meet after all.

"Well... Holy Temple of Andraste and all that... One does _try_ to keep one's mind on nobler things."

"And one's eyes on the floor."

I felt his shy smile against the skin of my neck, so very sweet. "Mmmyyeesss, but that didn't help much. Did you know that the floor was polished? And reflective?"

I burst out laughing. "You little sneak," I scolded, and kissed him hard when his look of puppy-eyed contrition proved irresistible, pulling myself tightly against him until he could no longer pretend that he wasn't aroused. His breath caught slightly and he unwrapped his arms from around my waist, touching me gingerly so he was sure he wasn't holding me against my will.

"I'm not scared of you and I'm not scared of your dick, now stop trying to pretend you don't have one and hug me," I ordered, pulling my head back to give him a stern look.

I said it so he would relax, because his nervousness was aggravating mine, and it wasn't until after he'd obeyed my mock-command that I realized I hadn't lied. I wasn't sure _what_ I was afraid of but it wasn't him, and the realization brought so much relief that it was easy to decide what I wanted to do.

I sought the hem of his shirt and slid my hand under it, grinning at him when I grazed a ticklish spot and he squirmed. When I slipped my fingers under the waist of his trousers he went very still.

"It's okay, you don't have to," he said quietly.

"I know." I giggled, a little lightheaded with epiphany, or maybe it was the altitude. "That's the point. I _don't_ have to, so now I want to. Gimme."

He laughed a little nervously, and I felt a burst of confidence when he didn't answer but let out a deep breath and relaxed under my touch.

And when he surrendered to me, biting his knuckles to keep from crying out, that confidence became a surprisingly gratifying triumph, and when he gathered me close and murmured my name into the soft skin between shoulder and neck, I wasn't afraid.

"You know, I wasn't, um..." he began after our hearts had slowed down, then hesitated, blushing. "I wasn't sure if – you know, when you did that before – if that was just a one-time thing, or-"

"Neither was I." I pressed a wet kiss on his cheek, grinning. "Further research was required."

"Do I need to watch the university press for a publication outlining the result of your research?"

"It's fun and we should do it all the time."

"Agreed!" Something in him relaxed and he let his head fall back against his pillow, apparently deeply relieved. He let out a long breath, cradling my head against his shoulder. "I love this."

"Oh I just bet you do," I teased.

"No, I mean," he gestured with his free hand, indicating the whole tent and the two of us entwined within. "The whole thing. I never thought anything like – _ you_ – would ever be a part of my life. I guess it's dumb and insecure but I never thought any woman even would let me near her, much less-"

"Latch onto you and refuse to let go?" I finished for him. "Insist on snuggles? Complain when you use that hand for _gesturing_ when it could be holding me?" I grabbed his free hand and pulled his arm around my shoulders, making him laugh.

"Right," he agreed, wrapping himself around me and kissing my temple. "And... If snuggles are all you want then that's fine but you know I would be more than happy to – okay! Bad idea, never mind," he said hurriedly when I stiffened.

"It's really not necessary," I muttered, feeling my face flush and hiding it against his chest.

"I know, it's just – ngg." He made a frustrated noise as he struggled for words. "I don't want to put pressure on you, I just want you to know that, if I don't, you know, touch you, it's not because I don't _want_ to, it's-"

"I know. Shh," I told him, covering his mouth with my own.

"Mm-hmm."

"Now go to sleep."

"Yes, ser."


	51. Andraste's Ashes

"Sit up straight. When you lean back like that, the pony thinks you want him to slow down," Alistair said to Brother Genitivi, who nodded and straightened. The pony blew air through his lips in mild annoyance and walked a little faster. He was small for Genitivi, but the mules weren't trained to be ridden.

"Who taught you to ride?" I asked Alistair curiously. "The Wardens or the Templars?"

His shoulders stiffened slightly, and he cleared his throat. "Uh. Nobody, actually. I just overheard a lot of other people's lessons when I lived in Redcliffe." He was silent for a few steps. "Look, there's something you should know."

I tucked my arm into his and waited.

"I didn't... Arl Eamon didn't have me live in the castle. I slept in the stables. So don't – don't start asking him stuff like which room was mine, or..." He trailed off, watching his feet as he scuffed his boots in the dust.

My jaw clenched with the effort of keeping my opinion on this to myself. Sodding arrogant arsehole, I'd _seen_ that castle, it wasn't like he didn't have room. He could have treated Alistair like the prince he was and it wouldn't have put a dent in his purse. Suddenly some of Alistair's idiosyncrasies made a lot more sense – not just the attraction to haylofts but also the way his manners were more like mine than Leliana's. And another reason for the low self-esteem.

"Okay," I said, when I trusted myself to sound calm. "Thanks for telling me before I embarrassed myself."

The tension in the muscles under my fingers relaxed a little. "Hah. You're welcome."

"I'm sure you can guess what I think about your living arrangements, so I'll spare you the impassioned speech about how you deserved better."

He laughed. "I don't know, I might not mind a speech about how awesome I am." _Maker knows nobody else has ever told me so_, was the unspoken subtext.

"Well, sod, where should I start?" I took a step away from him and held up my hands to frame my view of his face, like I'd seen the artisans do when considering their subject. "The golden tan, the sparkling eyes, or the way your hair's rocking the 'attractively tousled' look?"

"I haven't washed it in days," he admitted, grinning in spite of himself.

"Are you pointing out the obvious to our dear, handsome, oblivious Warden?" Zevran perked up his pointed ears and sauntered over to walk behind us. "Be sure to mention the spectacular view I am enjoying from my current position in the rear."

"The armor does frame his arse nicely, doesn't it?" I agreed, causing Alistair to sputter and blush.

"He's so charmingly innocent, as well," Zevran said as he observed the progress of the blush with satisfaction. Alistair groaned and covered his face with his hands, and Zevran laughed and sauntered away again, sensitive to the line between teasing and cruelty and, as always, making his exit just before crossing it.

I reached up and pulled Alistair's hands off his face. "That's not a bad thing, _salroka_. You're also sweet, and funny, and trustworthy, and as solid as stone, and you deserved to live like a king, not a stable boy."

"I'm happier living as a Gray Warden," he said, looking up from our clasped hands to meet my eyes. He bent down and kissed me softly, whispering, "With you."

"Can I quote that?" Leliana asked distractedly, glancing up from writing in her journal. When she realized she was intruding, she exclaimed, "Oh! I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking."

I ducked under Alistair's arm and we started back down the road, our progress made awkward by my shorter stride until we managed to work out a rhythm. "Are you writing our ballad? Already? Shouldn't you wait until you know if it's gonna be a tragedy or a comedy?"

"I'm guessing, with us, it'll still be a comedy even if everyone dies," Alistair said, prompting a giggle from Leliana.

The scent of smoke followed us the rest of the way down the mountain, a pall of ashes hanging in the air near its peak as the village of Haven slowly burned to the ground and took several acres of forest with it. In the end, a storm rolled in from the north and finally washed the air clean.

We retrieved Bodahn's wagon the next day and installed Genitivi on a cot in its cargo area, so the poor man could finally rest. Morrigan was doing her best to keep the disease in his ruined foot from spreading, and we hoped Wynne could do something more to help him with her greater experience in healing. The pony, relieved of its burden, sauntered along in the rear, taking bites of anything even remotely edible and many things that weren't, such as my hat.

"Looks like you made out okay, Bodahn," I said to him during my turn to ride on the wagon. "You got a pony."

He patted my knee. "No need to feel guilty, lass. I knew you lot were traveling a long and dangerous road when I signed on. Better than being devoured by the Horde, eh? And," he added, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, "they paid me in golden imperials, minted before King Maric debased the currency to pay for his war expenses. The coins are worth close to twice what they thought."

The weather held mostly fine, the roads blessedly free of mud and the almost-empty wagon bouncing easily over the ruts until finally we rolled into Redcliffe at a brisk trot. We passed the regiment of werewolves training with crossbows in the castle yard. A few looked up and waved, but most were focused on their task, so we left Bodahn at the stables and ran up the front stairs to find Teagan.

He was in his study, his brow creased with concentration as he pored over a ledger, but he stood up gladly to greet us. "What news, friends? Success? Maker's breath – Brother Genitivi! What happened to you, man?"

"It's nothing," the brother dismissed, crutching himself over to the desk and pulling the pouch of ashes out of his pocket. "Behold: The Ashes of Andraste!"

"Maker," Teagan breathed, touching the pouch reverently.

Wynne came down the hall from the library at a run, holding up her skirts with one hand, evidently having overheard Genitivi's proud announcement. "My dears! You found it? Astonishing!"

"Let us take it to my brother at once," Teagan urged.

Wynne nodded. "And not a moment too soon. His spirit wanders, calling for his family."

We stampeded up the stairs to the master bedroom, where Arl Eamon looked exactly as he had when he left. Wynne knelt at his side and tipped the ashes out into her palm, then placed them into his nostrils with exquisite care. When she was done, she stood and began to chant, weaving her hands in the counter-spell until a sharp tearing sound and a rippling in the air announced that the spell was broken.

Eamon gasped, and Wynne clapped her hand over his mouth, forcing him to breathe through his nose. His body spasmed with violent tremors and he gagged and coughed, the poison attacking him anew, and Alistair's hand tightened on mine until it hurt. Eamon's struggles grew weaker, and finally he subsided against the bed, breathing slowly and deeply.

Wynne stood, brushing her hands off on her apron. "He's sleeping. I believe," she paused for dramatic effect, her eyes blazing with triumph, "Arl Eamon is cured."

The room exploded in hoots of joy, Teagan clasping the cheering Alistair to his chest and pounding him on the back, repeating his thanks over and over. Leliana literally screamed with excitement, all her faith confirmed, and threw herself into Zevran's arms; caught up in her glee, he spun her around in a circle to make her laugh, and even managed to keep his hands off her arse. Morrigan folded her arms with a scowl.

I, meanwhile, stood and stared at the sleeping man on the bed. The Ashes had worked. Did that mean... Andraste really had been the Bride of the Maker? Was He _real_?

Stone have mercy, should we _all_ be worshiping Him?

"Tisha, I can't believe we really did it!" Alistair descended upon me and scooped me up, kissing me soundly on the mouth, and religious revelation was set aside for now.

"Out, out, you young hooligans," Wynne said finally, grinning as she shooed us out of the room. "Let the poor man sleep. And none of you are to so much as _mention_ the Blight _or_ Ostagar when he wakes up, not until I'm satisfied he won't drop dead of shock."

"A feast! We shall have a feast!" Teagan cried once we were out in the hallway. "Chamberlain! Go and tell the cook-"

A hoarse groan came from Eamon's bedroom, and Teagan instantly fell silent and leaned in through the doorway. We clustered around behind him trying to see what was happening.

Eamon's reddened eyes blinked once, twice, and then he turned his head toward his younger brother, his brow wrinkling in confusion. "T-Teagan?" he whispered.

"I'm here, brother." Teagan re-entered the bedroom, shutting the door behind him and leaving the rest of us to mill around outside. Alistair looked like he wanted to knock on the door, until Eamon's exhausted voice came again.

"Where is Isolde? Where is... my wife?"

Alistair's hand froze in the act of reaching for the door, and I touched his elbow. "Let's go. I don't think he'll want to see us right now."

"It'll be all right, though," Alistair said as he stumbled after me down the hall toward the guest rooms, looking back over his shoulder at the carved oak door. "We saved his life, and Connor's, and Teagan's, right?"

I slipped an arm around his waist, quick to reassure him once I realized where his thoughts were going. "He'll understand. Teagan will explain everything you did for Redcliffe. He couldn't fail to be impressed." _Not grateful, the arrogant old gilt-arsed noble probably thinks he's entitled to it, but impressed? Yes._

"Everything _we_ did, you mean." He ruffled my hair, making it fall over my eyes. I tucked it behind my ears like usual, but it was too long and wouldn't stay – I needed a haircut like nobody's business.

Wynne's footsteps approached from behind as she trotted after us. "Teagan wants time with his brother," she said by way of explanation when we raised our eyebrows at her. "Latitia, may I have a word?"

"Sure," I grunted and tossed my backpack into the room Alistair usually used, then followed it in, jumping up to sit on the edge of the bed. I beckoned for Alistair to come in, patting the bed beside me in invitation. He eyed Wynne apprehensively as he seated himself, but I was done having private conferences with this woman. Whatever she wanted to say, she could say it to both of us. While I was _holding Alistair's hand_. So there!

Wynne hovered in the doorway, then gave a small smile of amused understanding at my transparent little power play. She entered the room and lowered herself into one of the chairs. She started to fold her arms, then changed her mind and relaxed casually against the back of the chair instead, stretching her legs out on the rug. A small concession.

"So," I said.

"So," Wynne agreed.

There was an awkward pause. Alistair fidgeted. Rocky padded in, returning from a trip to the yard, and flopped on the rug in a patch of sun.

"I've been talking to Teagan," Wynne said at last.

"And?"

"He told me what you did for Redcliffe. Defending the town, defeating the demon. Saving Connor."

"Rocky and Morrigan were there, too." I was getting a little sick of everyone thinking I was doing all this stuff myself, when without all my friends I would be dead many times over.

"Yes." She fussed with the cuff of her left sleeve, smoothing the embroidery with her thumb.

"Look, I don't know what you think you learned, it's not like it was out of character for us," I burst out, irritated with her uncharacteristic slowness of speech. "We _did_ risk life and limb and _soul_ to save your Tower and everyone in it, when the Templars would have happily let you guys be demon food."

"I know, and I'm sorry," she cried, and I was shocked to see her eyes become damp. "I was so caught up in my guilt, I wasn't thinking. All I saw was failure – child after child, friend after friend, all dead. And then you were in my Fade dream, tearing me away from them. I know it was an illusion, but it felt so real."

She took a deep, steadying breath while I stared at her blankly, and then she continued. "Remember, I wasn't with you in the Brecilian Forest. I wasn't party to your decision-making there, or in Denerim. I wasn't there for Redcliffe, or just now, when you were achieving the impossible to cure Eamon. After the Tower, all I saw was a young, casteless dwarf with a silly sense of humor and dreadful table manners, doting on her smelly hound dog – no offense, Rocky dear – and apparently doing her best to ensnare a very promising young man."

"Well, screw you, too," I muttered.

"Ensnare?" Alistair protested.

"Forgive me," Wynne said quickly, "I am merely attempting to explain why – why I was wrong."

"Ooh, the 'W'-word," I said. "I hope it didn't burn your mouth on the way out."

"That's mean," Alistair said, and rubbed a hand across my shoulders to steady me. "She kind of has a point. We don't exactly act like the great warriors of old."

"We're not! We're the rejected dross of society, all of us! But we're all Ferelden's got." I shoved myself off the bed and paced across the too-small room.

Wynne said quietly, "I know, and nobody could have expected you to succeed even as far as you have. I thought you needed my guidance to keep you from falling into brigandry and worse. And yet... And yet."

"Get to the point, Wynne," I said.

"I had Owen make you a new set of armor. I know your own was built for a human woman and doesn't fit; I have seen the sores the buckles leave on your arms."

She crossed to the wardrobe, which she threw open to reveal a brand-spanking-new suit of studded leather on an armor stand. I approached it and reached out to touch the embossed griffon emblem on the breast, giving her a questioning look.

She looked relieved that I hadn't instantly rejected her gift. "A true Gray Warden should have armor worthy of her," she said, meeting my gaze.

"But-"

"I used my own money," she interrupted my protest, her eyes twinkling. "I have some savings, payment for odd jobs and such. I also had the opportunity to heal a fairly serious burn incurred by Owen's apprentice, so-"

"He gave you a discount," I nodded approvingly. "Nice."

Silence stretched for a long moment.

"I get your point, Wynne," I said finally. "Thank you. I look forward to soaking it in darkspawn blood."

"And walking dead, and spiders, and wolves, and cultists, and drakes," Alistair added, beaming in intense relief that we weren't fighting.

"You left out demons," I grinned at him. "Dinner?"

"Yes!" He jumped to his feet, Rocky only a step behind.

"It's only four," Wynne noted with a small smile.

"That's dinnertime for Gray Wardens," I told her. "So is five, and six, and seven, and eight, and any other time you care to name."

"I believe I shall dine at one of those later hours you mentioned," she said, and made her exit. "I wish to see to Brother Genitivi's injuries. Enjoy your dinner."

"Latitia! Alpha Alistair!"

As soon as the door opened, a cloud of women burst through it to bounce around us excitedly. "We live in the castle now! Where did you go? This place is so nice!"

"Look, my babies learned to smile," Sundancer pushed her way to the fore and held out a scowling little blanket-wrapped bundle. "Well, he isn't right now. But he will!"

I laughed and gave her a sideways hug to avoid squashing the baby. "You guys look great. Join us for dinner?"

We trooped down to find the great hall already being filled with extra chairs and tables as the chamberlain acted on Teagan's request for a feast. Teagan himself came down after a while, and talked to Alistair for several minutes in private, ending by giving him a hearty slap on the back. Evidently Eamon wasn't irretrievably angry, because Alistair looked pleased and happy when he came back carrying a bottle of ale.

"He's recovering quite rapidly," Teagan told us all then. "He should be up and about tomorrow. He wants to meet you all for dinner tomorrow, and discuss strategy. I would prefer than he take more time to rest, but..." He shrugged, conveying the impossibility of arguing with Arl Eamon once his mind was made up.

"But tonight,"he added, after the babble of excitement over the good news had died down, "I would very much like to hear all about what you lot have been up to."

I turned to our bard with a sweep of my arm "Leliana? Would you do the honors?"

She came to her feet, her eyes aglow, and launched at once into a tale of epic proportions, involving a great deal more exciting battle and much less "how can we sneak/lie/hide/cheat our way out of a fight" than I remembered, but hey – if she wanted to make us look awesome, who was I to argue?

* * *

_At least Leliana hasn't gotten around to setting it in iambic pentameter yet. That might have been a bit much, considering their half-werewolf audience._

_Sorry for the slow updates lately; work is... exciting. My clients all have great ideas for things to do to maximize their retail earnings this holiday season, or whatever. All I know is, it means less time for writing. *sigh* And then I spent the entire weekend mattress shopping. I think I lay on every mattress in the greater Boston area, but here's hoping better sleep = more creativity for me to share with you guys!_

_Thanks to mille libri, beta extraordinaire!_


	52. Nobility

_I know, it's long. I'm sorry! Thank you for bearing with me, and special thanks to heroic beta rescue by mille libri! Also extra thanks for everyone who reviews, especially Stickki, Cruellye, roxfox1962, Raven Jadewolfe, serenbach, The Fall., Arsinoe de Blassenville, Eva Galana, Nithu, interesting 2125, bioncafemma and Enaid Aderyn – your support means everything to me!_

* * *

I woke the following morning to find a very large nose snuffling my ear. The nose was much too big, not to mention cold and wet, to be Alistair, so I grumbled and pulled the blanket over my head. Rocky waited several seconds to see if any other acknowledgment would be forthcoming. I lay still and hoped fervently he would go away.

He whined, an incongruously high-pitched sound like steam escaping from a kettle: _Feeeee..._

Alistair groaned and rolled onto his back, rubbing his eyes. Rocky trotted to the bedroom door and whined some more, his paws dancing with urgency. Alistair glanced at the window and started with surprise. "Maker, look at the sun! It must be almost noon!"

"Wha'?" I squinted at the narrow band of sunlight that squeezed around the heavy velvet curtains. "So?"

"I feel so lazy, the Mother Superior would have had me sleeping on the floor if I got up this late at the monastery." He adopted a shrill, effeminate voice. "_Beds are a privilege, my son, reserved for those who can resist the lure of sloth._"

"I take it you spent most of your nights on the floor?"

"Ha ha, very funny." He pushed his blankets aside and stood, frowning at the coldness of the stone floor, and opened the door for the waiting dog. Rocky shoved his way through it, flinging the door wide in his haste, and galloped for the exit. "Ugh, no wonder I'm tired," Alistair continued, shutting the door again and slumping back onto the edge of the bed. "Isn't it weird how when you oversleep, it just makes you feel worse?"

"Yeah. Clearly we need to take a nap, since we're so tired." I pulled the blanket back over my head.

"No." He heaved a deep, resigned sigh. "No, we have to get up. Specifically-" He stood up and came around to my side of the bed, yanked the blanket out of my hands and scooped me up into his arms. "_You_ have to get up."

"Why?" I complained, kicking my bare feet in a halfhearted struggle.

"So we can have breakfast, and take Rocky for a run, and maybe see if we can destroy a few of Perth's practice dummies before supper, and hopefully by then I won't feel like my head is full of wool. Come on," his eyes became pleading, "don't make me go to the dining room by myself. What if the Arl is out of bed? You promised you'd back me up, remember?"

"Astyth's arse, that was ages ago, I can't believe you remember," I grumbled. "Fine, but I want payment. One hug, at least ten seconds long, or three kisses."

"Sounds fair," he agreed, dipping his head to deliver three long, slow, thorough kisses before setting me down on my slightly unsteady feet.

His fears were unfounded, however, the dining hall deserted except for Leliana and Zevran playing some sort of elaborate card game that I suspected was merely a stage for their equally elaborate flirtation, as Zevran's fingers lingered over hers a moment longer than necessary during a card exchange.

"Oh, hello, Wardens," Leliana chirped, her cheeks and lips flushed and her eyes bright.

"Are we interrupting?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.

"You are always more than welcome," Zevran said smoothly. "Shall I deal you in?"

Since we had little to do but wait for Eamon to be ready to see us, I agreed, and we played a couple of rounds while Alistair and I wolfed down some food. Eventually, though, Alistair started to fidget and glance at the door, so when that last round of cards ended I stood up and said, "Alistair wants to take Rocky for a run, you coming?"

Zevran shuddered. "Running? In broad daylight? With no guards chasing me? No, thank you. I prefer to take my cardiovascular exercise after the sun sets."

"I'm going to assume you're talking about dancing, and leave you to your cards, then." I laughed at Zevran's smirk and followed Alistair to the kennels to retrieve Rocky from where he'd gone to get his own meal.

* * *

My favorite defense had always been my feet, and there were few I'd met who could make me eat their dust, but Alistair was used to carrying a heavy load of armor and, free of its weight, his long legs gave him quite an advantage. So by the time we staggered back into the castle, my first act was to dunk my head under the water pump.

"Me next," Alistair panted, leaning forward with his hands braced on his knees while Rocky slurped at the water that poured over my face. I straightened, swiping water out of my eyes with the back of my hand, in time to see Leliana stand up from where she'd been reading on a bench and approach us.

"Andraste's grace, you look a fright," she said affectionately, pushing a strand of hair out of my eyes.

"How else am I supposed to keep my girlish figure if I don't exercise," I huffed. Alistair waved toward the pump handle, so I gave it a few more pumps, sending cold water gushing over his head.

She laughed. "You don't want to meet Arl Eamon Guerrin of Redcliffe like that, though, do you?"

That was a sobering thought. Alistair seemed to think so, too, straightening so fast he hit his head on the faucet. "Ow!"

"You should take a bath and put on clean clothes," Leliana advised. "I can do your hair if you want."

I smiled wryly at her offer. Evidently, persistence was about to pay off. "Fine. It's way too long and if I cut it myself, I'll end up half-bald."

When I was bathed, dried and dressed, Leliana sat me in a desk chair in front of a mirror and pulled out a pair of rather frightening shears.

"Do you want it short, like it was when we met?"

"Yes, please. Long enough to tuck behind my ears, though, so it won't get in my face."

"What about bangs?"

"I've tried them, but I get zits on my forehead."

"Really? Are you sure? You'd look so cute with bangs, with those cheekbones. Maybe just on one side-"

"No, thank you. Bangs are a total pain. Just chop the whole thing chin-length and be done with it, all right?"

"But you're so exotic-looking," she wailed. "With those great big brown eyes and cute round face and button nose-"

"I'm not exotic, I'm a dwarf," I grumped. "Not even a particularly pretty one, so just relax, all right? Don't get all worked up. It's just hair."

"_Just hair?_"

This cry was echoed from the bedroom doorway as Zevran strolled into the room just in time for my sacreligious comment.

"Now you've done it," said Alistair, coming in after him with a towel around his shoulders and his chin remarkably stubble-free. "You're going to have to let them do something fancy, or we'll never hear the end of it."

"What if I leave the front long so you can push it back, but cut the rest in lots of short layers? It would have lovely body," Leliana practically begged.

"Fine," I sighed. 'Short' sounded good, at least. Fewer tangles. "But only if Alistair lets Zev cut _his_ hair."

"What? No!" Alistair blanched and backed away from the perfectly-coiffed elf. "I cut my own hair!"

"That explains so much," Zevran murmured.

Leliana went to work, humming happily to herself as bits of mousy brown hair sprinkled the floor. Rocky came in after a bit and sniffed at them with interest, promptly getting hair up his nose and scampering around the room, sneezing and pawing at his face.

We made it down in time for dinner, looking reasonably presentable. Eamon walked into the dining room with Teagan on one side and a cane on the other. To me he looked much improved, compared to the corpse-like pallor and stillness he'd worn before, but Alistair's clear concern told me Eamon wasn't normally so wan and thin. He started toward the older man, but stopped, holding his arms awkwardly as though he wasn't sure what to do with them.

"Alistair," Eamon said warmly, patting his hand. "You've grown into a fine man."

"You can say that again," I said in undertone to Leliana, who bit her lip to keep from giggling.

I left my place at the table and sidled up beside Alistair, to be moral support I guess, though I didn't know what I could possibly do. Arl Eamon was the most powerful noble I'd met since the ill-fated King Cailan, and I felt very conscious of the callouses and scars that crisscrossed my hands and the blood stain on the left knee of my trousers that I hadn't noticed when I put them on.

"Th-thank you," Alistair stammered, flushing at the affectionate gesture, and followed along behind him as he made his painfully slow way to his seat.

At Eamon's gesture, Alistair sat stiffly to his left, and I plopped down beside him, finally attracting some attention from the older man's surprisingly penetrating grey eyes. "Ah," he said, straightening slightly in his chair as the butlers began setting bowls of soup before us. "You must be the young woman to whom we owe so much. I cannot thank you enough. For my own life, and that of my son, not to mention my lands and my people."

"No, ser," I shook my head, seizing an opportunity to back up my fellow Warden. "Thank Alistair. My guts would be decorating your battlements if I'd come here alone."

Eamon blinked. "A good point. Very... colorful. I would like to give you – all of you – some public recognition for your actions. It's no less than you deserve, and it couldn't hurt to give you whatever edge we can in swaying public opinion. Has Teagan explained the nature of the Landsmeet to you?"

"More or less. It sounds like the dwarven Assembly." I picked up my soup to blow on it.

"Close enough. I can call a Lansdmeet, assemble the other banns. If we can gather enough support, we can overthrow Loghain and seize control of the throne." Eamon held up a fist, his face transformed with determination.

"That sounds good," Alistair said, glancing at me. I nodded enthusiatically. "What do we have to do?"

"I'll need time to get messengers to everyone, and they will need time to assemble in Denerim. As soon as I'm strong enough to travel, I will move to my Denerim estate to be ready to meet with anyone who arrives early and wants to talk. Even a single vote can sway the outcome of the whole Landsmeet. During that time, I suggest you continue to gather martial support from unconventional sources, as you have done with the mages and the elves. Well done, by the way. I would never have expected the elves to lift a finger in assistance to humans."

"The Blight endangers us all," Wynne stated.

"It does indeed, my good woman." Eamon smiled at her.

"We just have one treaty left to fulfill," I said. "We have to go to Orzammar and see if we can get the nobles to honor their agreement."

"Why do I think it won't be easy," Alistair groaned.

"Because it won't," I answered. "They fight like rats in a sack. When they're not busy having dusters drawn and quartered, they're exiling each other or, worse, siccing their lawyers on each other."

"Sounds like home," Zevran drawled.

"Surely you are exaggerating," Wynne said, frowning.

I shrugged. "I might be slightly biased, but that's what I've heard. It'll be interesting, that's for sure. Not least because the first cops I meet are likely to try to throw me in jail. The Warden griffon on my new armor will be helpful there," I added, looking at Wynne.

"I'm sure the dwarven armies would be invaluable," Eamon said, observing this interaction with interest. "Your people have greater familiarity with the darkspawn than anyone."

I grimaced. "Eurgh, yes. Don't remind me. It'll be good to get back in the earth, though. Sky is all well and good, I suppose, but it's not a pox on a good hard stone ceiling. Speaking of which, Ea – _Arl_ Eamon, did you know that tunnel you got under the lake is dwarven?"

Eamon pursed his lips, nodding thoughtfully. "That makes sense. This castle was originally built to defend against dwarven invasion."

I stared at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. "Good one!"

"I don't get it," Alistair said.

"A castle? To defend against the dwarves?" I said, grinning. When he still looked blank, I prompted, "Dwarves who dig tunnels? Do you really think we would bother to lay siege to a castle when we could just walk underground all the way to Denerim and dig a mile-deep sinkhole right under the palace?"

"Good lord," Teagan said. "I never thought of that. Ha!"

He chuckled, but Eamon's smile was a little cold, and I turned back to my food, wishing I'd thought before I'd laughed in his face and called his castle useless.

"Anyway," Teagan said, glancing at us and leaning forward to redirect the conversation. "Eamon, our young friends here have been up to quite a bit of excitement."

"Yes, please, do fill me in," Eamon nodded.

"Leliana, can we impose upon you once more?" I asked, but she was already taking a sip of water and clearing her throat. Her narrative took us through to the end of dinner, and we were demolishing a tray of apple turnovers when her tale wound to a close.

"Maker's breath," Eamon said into the silence that fell after she finished speaking. "You must be exhausted!"

"Ha! A bit. We slept in this morning," I admitted, surrepticiously dropping a turnover into Rocky's waiting jaws. An elegantly tapered gray muzzle replaced his blunt brown one, and I palmed a second turnover for Morrigan.

"Alistair," Eamon said after a thoughtful pause. "When we call the Landsmeet, we cannot simply remove Loghain. We must fill the vacuum his absence will leave. We must have a new king for the nation to rally around."

Alistair licked crumbs off his lips and sat back in his chair. "We sort of thought that would be you – I mean, if you don't mind my saying so."

"I could make a claim, yes, but my claim would be no better than Loghain's. I would look like an opportunist. No, we need real royal blood. We need the legacy of King Calenhad. I never thought I would ask this of you, but your actions prove you are up to the task."

Alistair flinched back from the older man and turned panicked eyes on me. Eamon saw where he looked for support, and leaned forward to talk past Alistair and directly to me. "Latitia, you seem to think highly of Alistair. I wish to present him as the alternative to Loghain. Do you not agree he would make a fine king for Ferelden?"

My eyes widened – _King_ Alistair? I mean, I knew he _said_ he didn't want to be king, but I was sure that was because he was afraid of the responsibility. I could help, we could marshal the armies of the entire nation against the Blight, Alistair would live in a _palace_ and (I remembered watching him bleed on the Harrowing chamber floor, sweat and vomit in the Brecilian forest, stagger away from a mound of walking dead so caked in gore he was unrecognizable) he would never have to march to battle again. He would be _safe_.

All that flashed through my mind in an instant and I blurted out, "I think that's a great idea!"

"_What?_" Alistair gripped the arm rests of his chair so tightly the wood creaked. His look of flat shock transformed into hurt, then anger, and he rounded on Eamon. "What about me? What about what _I_ want?"

"Do you not want to do what is necessary to preserve Ferelden?" Eamon said calmly. "We cannot allow Loghain to win. We must control the Landsmeet. You are the only man who can rally the banns, the only man who can defeat the Blight. Would you really refuse the throne, knowing what your selfishness would cost?"

"I..." Alistair's face hardened, and he looked away. "No. I'll do it." He folded his napkin in half and dropped it on the table, then stood up and pushed his chair in neatly. "Please excuse me. I need... to go."

"Of course," Eamon agreed. He could afford to be magnanimous. He'd gotten what he wanted.

I glanced from one man to the other, not sure if I should go with Alistair or not, but the look of black betrayal he shot me when I reached for his hand pinned me to my chair. I watched him wander out of the room. Rocky got up and trotted after him, whining softly. After he was out of sight, I felt his movement in my blood as he kept going out the front door and away.

"He'll be all right," Eamon assured me after a few minutes, when I kept looking in the direction he'd gone. "He just needs some time for himself. He's always been like that. When he comes back, he'll be as sunny as ever."

I nodded, sliding down in my chair another couple inches. I felt sick and wished I hadn't eaten so much. Leliana started a conversation about the workings of the Landsmeet, and I probably should have been paying attention, but I couldn't have even if someone paid me.

This was the right thing to do, right? For Thedas, for Fereldan, _and_ for Alistair. Right? I would explain. He would understand. Being a king couldn't be that bad. Everyone else seemed to _want _to be a king. And anyway, it's not like he'd have to do it alone, after all. I would tell him all this, as soon as he came back.

Actually, sod that. Eamon was hardly the right person to judge what Alistair needed. How could _he_ know whether Alistair needed to be alone or not? It's not like Alistair could ever have talked to _him_ about anything that bothered him.

"I'm going to go after him and explain." I stood up abruptly, interrupting a lively discussion of the politics between the Chantry and the throne, and started from the room. "Goodnight, all. It was nice to meet you, Eamon."

He inclined his head at me politely before turning back to Teagan. I'd forgotten to call him Arl, I realized, but didn't much care – I was thinking about the way he'd so smoothly bypassed Alistair and gone straight to me, using me to bully him into agreeing right away when surely, _surely_, if it was such a good idea then he would have agreed on his own once he'd had time to think.

I followed the pull of his Warden blood through the courtyard and into the training ground, where he was demolishing a practice dummy with all the grace and sophistication of a miner swinging his pickaxe. He made no move to acknowledge me, but he must have known I was there. When he stopped for breath, I asked, "Alistair?"

He didn't say anything at first, just panted and leaned on his sword. Finally he shoved it into its sheath and turned around, folding his arms. "What do you want?"

"Are you mad at me?" _Of course he is_, I thought wretchedly.

"I wish-" He stopped and cleared his throat, and tried again. "I wish you had talked to me before you – I thought – I thought you were happy."

I frowned, confused. "What? What're you talking about?"

"Well, you could have just _told_ me you didn't want – to be with me, anymore. You didn't have to sell me to Eamon like a side of bacon." He took three steps back and fell onto a bench at the edge of the training grounds, dropping his head into his hands.

"What? What're you-" I stopped before I repeated myself, and ran across the grounds, hesitating before I touched him. "I _do_ want to be with you! I thought making you king would be great – you could live in the palace, with guards and servants and shit, and you'd be safe. You won't have to do it all alone, I'll be there and I'll help you!"

He laughed bitterly. "What, you're going to stay on as my advisor? Great."

I just stared at him, bewildered, until he raised his head from his hands and said incredulously, "You don't see the problem at all, do you."

"No, I don't!"

"Latitia, if I'm crowned king, it would mean the end of us. I'd have to get married, have a queen, and you're not a Fereldan citizen. You're not even human, for Andraste's sake!"

I drew back, hurt. "So? I never expected you to marry me anyway." _Never dared to hope, would be more accurate._ "That doesn't mean I can't be..." I stumbled over the word, feeling my cheeks flush. What use would I be as a concubine? I couldn't bear his child. I couldn't even bear his touch.

"Be what? My mistress? A glorified prostitute?" He came to his feet again, balling his fists, and paced away from me. "No. I would never do that to you. Not to mention my ... wife. And the Landsmeet-"

"I don't give a nug's arse about the Landsmeet, or your _wife,_" I shouted. "_You_ said you weren't in line for the throne. You let me think what I was didn't matter to you, but now that you're a _king,_ now it's suddenly a problem? A _glorified prostitute_ not good enough for King Alistair?"

He spun to face me, appalled. "What? No! I never said that! Listen, you don't understand-"

"No, I don't. I'm an ignorant duster." I turned and plodded out of the training grounds, ignoring his frustrated calling. Rocky cast a reproachful look at Alistair and padded after me.

We walked through the castle's dark halls, needing no light as the sun set and the night brought its blessed privacy. My head felt like it had been turned upside down and shaken, and I wandered without thought or intention until I found myself following the faint song of the old dwarven tunnel. Rocky nudged his head under my hand, and I guided him down the slope as low as we could go without ending up in the permanent puddle that collected in its deepest part. I leaned against the wall for a moment, then slowly slid down it to the floor, hugging my knees to my chest.

A thump and a muffled curse floated down the tunnel, and I squinted in its direction as a match flared and lit a candle, casting Zevran's angled features into brilliant illumination after the blackness of the tunnel.

"That is better," he said, smiling. "Stone sense is all well and good for some, but others of us need a little artificial assistance."

"Hi," I said, resting my chin on my knees.

He folded himself neatly beside me, setting his candle into a notch between paving stones. "I may have eavesdropped, just a little."

"I'm not surprised."

"Fereldans like to believe they are great champions of the common man," he said conversationally. "They condemn Orlais, Antiva, Tevinter; they claim they are so very progressive. No slaves in Ferelden, they say. As though that makes their alienages any less dreadful. At least a slave is fed. A dead slave is no use to anyone, after all."

He glanced at me, then sighed. "That's right, you have not yet had the pleasure of a trip to an alienage. I expect you will find it comforting. A taste of home."

"I expect you're being sarcastic, or I'll give you a taste of my boot up your arse," I said without heat.

"Aha! There she is, _mia sveglia bella,_" he chuckled. "In the Crows, there was no pretense. I was an investment, a tool. A valuable tool, but still a tool."

I snickered at his cheap double entendre, knowing he'd done it on purpose to amuse me. He flashed me a quick grin, and laid his arm gently across my shoulders.

"How glad they are, these men of state, to use us while we are useful," he said quietly. "And how quick to cast us aside, when we are not. Lost in hopes and dreams, we may forget what we are, but they never do."

I started to object, to defend Alistair as not being as bad as all that, until it occurred to me his words had an odd timbre of self-loathing and disgust. Zevran had spent a lot more time in high company than I had, and had many more opportunities to be reminded that he wasn't one of them. So instead I turned and pressed my face into his shoulder and wept in the silence under the stone.

"I want to go home," I whispered. I knew I sounded like a whiny toddler but couldn't help it.

"That is an achievable wish. We could leave tomorrow morning," he suggested.

I nodded and wiped my face on my sleeve. "Okay. Yeah. I guess there's no point hanging around here."

"It is late," he said gently. "May I walk you to your room?"

I shook my head. "I'm just gonna sleep here. You can go."

"On the floor?" he said with surprise.

I gave him a wry half-smile. "Wouldn't be the first time I've slept on stone."

"Dwarves," he sighed, rolling his eyes in mock-exasperation. He gave my shoulders a squeeze, and stood up, retrieving his candle. Rocky lifted his head and thumped his stumpy tail in farewell, and the orange light followed Zevran down the tunnel until the velvet darkness embraced us once more.


	53. The Space Between

_Sorry for the slow posting lately, guys – work is crazy this time of year, and of course there's family stuff to do, too. Fun family stuff, but it's awful hard to work on fanfiction while out shopping for Christmas trees or dismantling pumpkin pies!_

_Three hurrahs for mille libri's jiffy beta duty! As always, thank you for reading and especially for reviewing, you're awesome!_

_BTW, this chapter earns its M rating toward the end, just letting you know._

* * *

I woke after some hours of fitful sleep and rolled onto my back, stretching slowly. I felt bruised and beaten, and not entirely because I'd slept on the hard stone. When I lay still for too long, Rocky snorted and heaved himself to his feet before nudging me pointedly with his cold nose. We slogged through the puddle toward the windmill entrance of the tunnel, intending to get some food at the inn, but the trap door refused to open without Teagan's signet ring.

"Guess there's no putting off seeing the others," I said to Rocky's pricked ears. He woofed in affirmative and led the way back to the castle at a purposeful trot.

But when we emerged into the pantry, it was quiet but for the baker, who looked up with surprise when we emerged and narrowed his eyes at the hound. "No dogs in the kitchens, I won't allow it," said the baker in a tone of command that an army general might envy. He turned his back on us and returned to shaping a tray of rolls for breakfast, which was still a few hours away.

I snagged a couple of meat pies on our way out and gave one to Rocky. "He might be a pompous ass, but he does make good pies," I told the dog as we headed for the bathroom.

I washed up a little and brushed my hair, and, feeling civilized again, went looking for Bodahn at the inn, sidling out the servant's entrance without encountering anyone I knew. As often as we'd told my fellow dwarves that they were welcome to join us in the castle, Bodahn insisted Sandal was more comfortable in the less crowded accommodations, meaning that the inn's stables never had any other occupants and they had the place to themselves. Them and their mules, anyway. The sun finished rising while we walked, and we found the two merchants just finishing getting dressed.

"Can we leave for Orzammar today?" I asked Bodahn as he climbed down from the wagon tongue.

His cheery face was briefly creased with a frown. "I did have some trading I wanted to do first, if it's not too much of a delay."

"Sure, I'll come along," I offered quickly.

Bodahn made his rounds through the town, visiting the general store (which had finally reopened under new ownership by a widow named Jetta), the tavern, the smithy, and a few other odd places including a fisherman who sold him an iridescent powder made of fish scales. At first I plodded along in his wake, but after a while I get caught up in the shopping and I bought perfume and a set of combs made of horn for Rica, and some great leather boots for Leske, much better than the ones available in Dust Town. One couldn't overestimate the value of good boots. I bought some for myself, too, after a moment's dithering over the price; mine had seen an awful lot of use lately.

Zevran, may the Stone bless his heathen elven heart, had everyone packed and ready to go by the time we were back to Bodahn's wagon. Wynne was there, standing on the edges with her bag over her shoulder. She watched me warily as I entered, wondering if she was coming or not, and I gave her a short nod when she caught my eye; I didn't have energy to waste harboring a grudge against her. Relieved, she dropped her bag onto the pile and we all began to help Sandal and Bodahn organize the extremely full cargo area.

Alistair 'coincidentally' found himself helping me hand bolts of silk and linen up to Sandal. He cleared his throat awkwardly, and I bit my lip at the deep resonance of the sound, remembering feeling his chest rumble under my cheek when he spoke. "Um..." he began.

"How's Eamon?" I asked. _Please let's not have this talk right now, not in front of everyone!_

"Eamon?" He sounded startled by the question. "He's fine. Marching around, delivering orders, making impassioned speeches. You know."

"Yeah."

"Uh..." He cleared his throat again, handing me a thick bolt wrapped in burlap and labeled 'yellow linen.' "Are you, uh... okay?"

"Yeah," I lied. We worked in heavy silence for a moment before I added, "I'm sorry I yelled at you."

"Oh! Me, too!" His shoulders sagged with relief and he almost dropped the wooden crate he was holding as he reached out to touch my arm. "Really, Tisha, I'm really, really sorry-"

I stiffened, unwilling to publicly embarrass myself by either losing my temper or, worse, bursting into tears. He noticed I wasn't looking at him, and glanced around to see what I was scowling at. All other work in the barn had ceased as our little band waited in breathless anticipation to see what happened next. When Alistair was thus reminded that we weren't really alone and this wasn't really the time, he flushed darkly and turned back to the wagon. The others sighed and went back to work, except for Zevran, who gave Alistair a critical look for a moment before _tsk_-ing and shaking his head in a disappointed way.

As Sandal was giving his beloved mules a final check to ensure no shoes were loose and no buckles needed tightening, a shadow fell through the barn door and we looked up to see Teagan holding the lead lines of two handsome mules, sorrel where Bodahn's were dark but otherwise very similar.

"I think you'll agree that time is of the essence," he said with a smile. "I asked one of my brother's tenant farmers to lend us his mules – he hasn't much use for them this time of year, anyway. If you have two teams, they can take turns on the long climb into the mountains, and you'll make better time."

Bodahn practically fell over himself thanking Teagan, wringing his hand and promising extraordinary bargains by way of thanks, and somehow Teagan left the barn as the new owner of a hat and a matching cheese knife, with the slightly dazed expression worn by victims of the skilled merchant's gratitude.

The weather held fine for most of the day, but more of the indecisive gray clouds blew in with the sunset, the kind that couldn't decide whether to rain now or rain later, and wore out their welcome by occasionally spitting experimentally down at us. Still embarrassed about putting himself forward that morning, Alistair didn't try to talk to me again but took refuge in his armor, keeping his helmet on and striding manfully in the front of our little caravan to deter bandits. I might have teased him for making a bright, shiny target of himself, but I wasn't sure I could get the words out. I wasn't sure of much of anything, except that the surface world had lost some of its shine.

So, when we made camp, I joined Bodahn and Sandal and helped them make spaetzle noodles for dinner. We talked about how a nug roast would really hit the spot and it wouldn't be long now before we could get some proper food, and complained companionably about how nobody makes anything good anymore and the only worthwhile smithing to be found is what the scouts bring back from the Deep Roads, and wasn't it outrageous the way the Chantry throttled the lyrium trade when it was _our_ lyrium and we should be able to sell it to anyone we wished, and I could almost pretend I couldn't sense Alistair's heartbeat in my veins as he paced the perimeter of the camp.

* * *

The second day's travel went smoothly despite the continued Ferelden-style drizzle, the road well-paved with no mud to mire the wagon wheels. Our company's behavior was businesslike, with little of the usual banter, but I was proud of myself (and, if I would admit it, of Alistair) for not letting the quiet mood become grim or depressed. After all, I'd borne pain before; I could bear it again. Eventually it wouldn't ache so much. Eventually. And in the meantime, there was work to be done.

When the day had worn, and I saw a likely-looking campsite under a copse of trees from my perch atop the wagon, I cleared my throat and called, pointing, "Alistair, should we make camp there?"

He looked back at me, his eyes veiled behind his visor, then at the trees. "Yeah, okay. Sure."

There! A successful interaction. We're all adults here. Nobody needed to sulk. I left him digging the firepit, as was by now routine, and entered the copse with Rocky to look for wood, throwing my cloak over my shoulders in case the clouds decided to rain after all.

The 'copse' turned out to be the top edge of a forest that extended into a valley I hadn't seen, so that I had wandered far from camp before it occurred to me to wonder why I hadn't come to its end yet. Stupid duster, getting lost in the trees. Stupid trees, all looking alike.

I remembered that I would be back underground soon, expecting that to be a comfort as I frowned at the blackening sky and tried to get my bearings, but as every step today had taken us closer to Orzammar, the idea had moved closer to reality. And the reality was that I would very likely be refused entrance, Warden or not. If I did make it inside, how would I get into the Palace? Brands weren't even allowed to muck out the latrines in there. I shivered at facing their sneers again, alone, without Alistair's safe haven.

I was on my way back to camp, clinging on to my level mood with clenched teeth and fingernails, when I felt Alistair coming out to meet me and stopped walking. _Not here_, I thought desperately. _Not now. I can't bear it_.

"Hey," he said with hearty cheer, when he emerged from the trees. "Want a hand?"

I missed the beat, so that when I did respond, my tongue tripped over itself trying to catch up and not show how uncomfortable I was. "Yeah sure, b-but aren't you supposed to be lighting the fire?"

He gave a disgusted snort. "Evidently Wynne can light a fire by giving it a stern look. When I asked why she'd been letting me burn my fingers lighting it myself all this time, she said it was important for me to feel _useful_."

I let out a startled bark of laughter that made Rocky flick his ears. "Ha! And the ability to send a hurlock's head flying isn't useful?"

"It's my ability to lift heavy objects that really sets me apart. You need a box moved, or a stubborn jar opened, I'm your man." He scooped the branches out of my arms and lifted them easily up onto his shoulders to demonstrate.

"Or a scholar carried nuggy-back." I tried to continue the limping conversation as we started back to camp.

"Yes. I'm still mad that I missed out on the drake, you know. Not fair of you to keep all the excitement to yourself like that."

"I didn't even properly appreciate the battle. Perfectly good drake, wasted on someone who just wants it dead."

He didn't pick up the thread, and the silence stretched long enough to get uncomfortable before he said, in a very different voice with a lot less bravado, "You're... satisfied with this?"

"This?" I repeated as though I didn't know perfectly well what he meant. This friendly banter, held at arm's length. This denial.

He stopped in a grassy clearing, and made a vague gesture indicating the space between us. "This. _Just_ this."

"Would you rather scream and yell? Should I burst into tears and run off, sobbing inconsolably?" That sounded pretty good right now, actually.

"No, of course not!"

"Then why are you bugging me about it?" I snapped, hugging myself in the cooling night air. "We're stuck working together, so it's no use moping about and writing lousy poetry. We might as well be f-friends, even if we can't..." I had no idea how to end that sentence, so I just lifted my chin stubbornly and met his eyes.

Which was a mistake, because they were earnest and longing, and I was almost undone even before he started talking. "I know, and I'm trying, but-"

He swallowed, and thankfully looked away before he continued quietly, "But I can't just pretend my feelings have changed. I know you feel... rejected, but I swear on Andraste's pyre, I never – I would _never_ give you up willingly. But being King isn't just a job, and keeping a mistress isn't something an honorable man would do, it just isn't. I know it's different for dwarves, but the Landsmeet members are humans, and they won't accept it."

"I know," I said quietly. "I thought about it, and I think I understand. It's not your fault the Landsmeet are an infighting, fickle pack of deepstalkers. Your claim is already tenuous without inviting scandal – any weakness could be exploited. I couldn't bear it if I were a danger to you."

"I really don't want to fight," he pleaded, taking a step closer.

"We're not fighting." I turned my face away. "I understand. I'm not upset."

"Well, I am!" He abruptly tossed his armload of sticks away and threw up his hands, pacing a few angry steps away and then back again. "I don't _want_ to be king! I _never_ wanted to be king! But I've never had any control over my life, and I still don't. First it was just Eamon controlling me, then it was the Chantry, and apparently now the entire sodding nation of Ferelden is demanding my service whether I like it or not."

"I'm sorry-"

"The first thing I ever _wanted_ to do was be a Gray Warden," he went on, almost to himself. "And I thought nobody could ever take that away from me, but... Even that! I'm supposed to just _give up_ the duty that cannot be foresworn? Do oaths mean _nothing_ anymore?"

"You'll still be a Gray Warden," I said hopelessly.

"You mean, I'll still die of the taint," he spat bitterness. "Alone, in a palace, surrounded by vultures. Or maybe I'll get lucky, and they'll let me go to the Deep Roads, and I can pretend I'm a Warden one last time before I die."

"Maybe you'll be even luckier, and die killing the Archdemon," I suggested with brittle cheer. "Maybe we'll _both_ die fighting it, and they'll build a memorial. It's something to hope for, anyway."

That seemed to sober him a little, and he stopped his restless pacing. "That actually brings me to my point. Believe it or not, I was trying to make a point, and not just rant."

I nodded, miserable, hoping he would stop torturing us both and we could go back and get something to eat and pretend this hadn't happened. "Go on."

"Okay." He took a deep breath. "We don't really _know_ I'll be king. I mean, we do have a pretty dangerous job, and we might die tomorrow, right? And we don't know Eamon can convince the Landsmeet to back my claim, either, I mean, _look_ at me."

He held out his arms, clearly thinking himself a terrible choice of king. I agreed, but mainly because I didn't think any crown could be handsome enough to do him justice.

"So," he went on hesitantly, "so maybe we don't have to, um... Maybe trying to, you know, 'just be friends' is a little premature? Can we just sort of take it one day at a time?" When I didn't instantly shut him down, he laughed a little nervously and added, "Won't we feel stupid if we're doing the noble sacrifice thing, and pretending we don't care for each other, and then it turns out they make Eamon king after all?"

"You're saying," I said slowly, "that I should pretend you're not the possible future King of Ferelden, and I'm not possibly about to be discarded for my inadequacy? We should pretend nothing happened, and go on doing whatever we want, without thinking about the future because the future sucks too much to think about?"

He looked crestfallen. "I guess that's not very responsible, is it?"

"So? I think it's a great idea." I grinned suddenly. "I'm _really good_ at pretending nothing happened. I'm even better at pretending everything is fine. It's a valuable skill when life is awful and there's nothing you can do about it."

"Really?" His eyes lit with hope. "You're not mad at me, or, I don't know, offended or anything?"

"No. You could have boned my mom and I wouldn't care, I've already forgotten about it." I grabbed for his hands and fumbled to hold them, shaking and clumsy, until I gave up and threw myself at him to be caught and held against his chest, crying, "I don't care, I don't care about Eamon or anything else. I need you."

"Oh, thank the Maker," Alistair choked out, holding me tightly enough to press the air from my lungs. It felt wonderful. "You have no idea how relieved I am. Being near you was making me crazy, I felt like my head would explode. Another day or so of being 'just friends' and I think I'd have cracked."

"Mmf."

"Sorry." He loosened his grip. "I'm sorry. Really, I'm sorry-"

"I know," I interrupted him, tugging on his shirt. Damned tall humans.

"I never meant to hurt you, I love you so much-"

"Either sit down or hold me up higher!" I demanded.

"What? Oh!"

His eyes widened with comprehension when I reached up and took his head in both hands and pulled it down, meeting his lips with mine. He started to sit but we got tangled up in my cloak and fell, giggling, to the soft grass with me plastered all over him and trying to eat his face.

"We were apart for, what, 48 hours?" he panted when I let him breathe. "How does it feel like so much longer?"

"It was at least 56 hours," I told him, my hands roving over his shoulders and down his sides to slip under the hem of his tunic, wanting to feel his bare skin under my fingers.

"That – ah! – that explains it." He laughed when I grazed a ticklish spot and caught my hands to kiss the backs of my knuckles. "Maybe we should go back? Find a tent?"

"Nuh-uh, this is more private." We both imagined the entire camp pretending not to be listening as hard as they could, and he nodded, understanding. "Also," I added, leaning down to kiss him again, with more care and thoroughness this time, "camp is much too far away."

"Yes," he murmured between kisses. "Definitely too far." He was as hungry for touch as I was, and open and eager for me to ravish his mouth and let my hands travel where they would.

But still I ached with desire to make him _mine_, the feeling of having almost lost him still a raw and painful reminder of how transient this moment was. When he reached up to caress my cheek, I leaned against his calloused palm, feeling the strength underneath the gentleness and was suddenly awash with certainty that he would never, ever use that strength to hurt me.

I sat back, ignoring his questioning look, and began to struggle with the laces of his trousers, swearing softly when my shaking hands just tied the knots tighter.

"I'll get it," he offered, and while he was at it I tossed off my cloak and pulled my tunic over my head, and I was struggling out of my boots when his startled gasp let me know he'd finally looked up. I grinned at his shock and knelt over him, pushing him back unresisting to lie on the grass.

"Wait, are you – are you sure? You really want to do this _now_?" he stammered.

"Yes. Now." _Before I lose my nerve_.

"I'm not arguing-"

"I can see that," I said coyly. His eyes widened as I took his shaft in my hand and guided its tip against me. "You stay right there," I ordered. "You keep your hands on the ground and you _don't move_."

"Yes, ma'am!" He lifted his head for a moment to gaze in wonder as I lowered myself onto him.

My eyes closed for a moment in concentration. Almost immediately, a vivid wash of color and sensation poured over me and I shoved the unwanted memory aside, opening my eyes to focus on Alistair. _This is different. Nobody's forcing me this time. __**I **__want this._ Keeping my eyes on his, I began to move, and focused every fiber of my being on pleasing him so I wouldn't think about anything else.

His eyes grew heavy-lidded and glazed with pleasure, and pride mingled with nerves as I caught his wrist before he could touch me and leaned my weight on it, pressing it into the grass. "_Stay_," I growled.

"S-sorry." He let his head fall back and closed his eyes. "Feels _really_ good."

"Yeah, it does," I lied, and it took me a few seconds to realize I wasn't lying, not quite, and when he stiffened and cried out, and I relented and let him cling to me as he shuddered and throbbed... and for the first time, I began to understand why someone might pay good gold for a good whore.

I lay on Alistair's chest, cooling off while I listened to his ragged breathing gradually slow. After a few minutes he reached out and groped around on the ground with one hand until he found my cloak and pulled it over me.

"Thanks," I said drowsily.

He enfolded me in his arms again and kissed the top of my head. "Are you okay?" he asked, cautiously, as though he was afraid to hear the answer.

"I think so. Yeah... More than okay." My arms tightened around him. _Mine_. There was no way, no possible way I was giving him back to Eamon, I realized. We'd just have to figure something out.

"Maker's breath, we have to get back," Alistair said suddenly, sitting up despite my wordless protest. "They're bound to come looking if we're gone too long."

I burst out laughing. "Image Wynne's face if she found us!"

"It's not funny!" Alistair insisted as he dragged his trousers on. "I'd never be able to look at her again. And Zevran is going to be insufferable, I just know it."

He was pretty insufferable, it turned out. To be fair, so was everyone else, even Wynne, whose knowing look was somehow far more disturbing than any open lewdness. When she asked, with an arched eyebrow, whether we had indeed found any wood, "since you were out looking for _so_ long," Alistair groaned and covered his face in his hands.

"We forgot it," he sighed. "I'll go back."

"I'll help." I started to follow him.

"No, don't!" Zev cried merrily. "Then we might be waiting until dawn!"

"I hate you so much," I muttered, throwing myself down to sit beside him instead.

He picked a leaf out of my hair. "You might want to brush this."

"Shut up."

"As you command, o glorious leader."


	54. An Orzammar Welcome

The road to Orzammar's surface entrance was well-traveled and dotted with level spots where a wagon might stop to rest its mules, and we made excellent time despite the steep grade. The day when we would arrive dawned clear and very cold. Alistair had polished his (already clean and well-kept) armor to a high shine and hammered out the worst of the dents in an effort to look more respectable, and I dressed in my new armor; together we looked like a reasonably believable official Gray Warden envoy, as long as nobody looked too closely at our motley companions. And ignored my branded face. Maybe I should buy a helmet with a visor.

But as we drew closer, we began to pass more and more merchant caravans going the opposite direction, their draft animals tired and their drivers' faces set into identical expressions of dismay and tightly contained anger.

"Maybe people are going home because winter's coming," Alistair suggested, seeing my worried glances in their direction. He gave my shoulder a reassuring squeeze, and I leaned on him for a moment, very glad to be allowed the privilege once more.

The paved plateau that had been so colorful and noisy when I passed through it with Duncan had dwindled to a few dogged purveyors of travel rations and oats, to supply the merchants who were on their way home. I looked up at the guardian statues with undisguised joy, and shivered with pleasure when the tunnel's entrance beckoned to me.

Beside the massive stone gates stood the guards' pavilion, and beside that stood a few tents stamped with the Ferelden royal crest, which Alistair eyed with curiosity and suspicion. When we left Bodahn discussing care for his mules with the market quartermaster and approached the gate guards with the rest of our party in tow, a man in red armor leaned out of the largest tent to watch.

Alistair pulled the sealed scroll out of his pack and held it out like a shield. "We require entry into the city to present this treaty to the King," he said to the senior guard after glancing at me for confirmation. "Gray Warden business."

"Whoa, now, just hold on one minute!" cried the red-armored man. He scrambled out of his tent. "I'm here from the Regent of the throne of Ferelden itself, which, I might add, _includes_ this mountain, and you've been letting me cool my heels for days. You can't possibly be considering letting these Gray Warden _traitors_ in before _me_."

The senior guard's expression changed from annoyance to open dislike as the man spoke, and he deliberately ignored him, leaning forward instead to look more closely at the seal on the scroll. I noticed as he did so that the edge of a tattoo curled up from under his beard, and I realized suddenly that the outside guards were essentially in exile, just like the surface merchants and everyone else who'd dared to leave Orzammar and walk under the sun.

"Looks official enough," the man said in a deep, slightly drink-roughened voice. "But there's a problem-"

"_What!_" the Regent's representative exploded. "I will not stand for this insult! Regent Loghain himself declared the Gray Wardens traitors. If you ally yourselves with them-"

"Okay, I've heard just about enough of the T-word," Alistair snapped, turning to face the man, who took an involuntary step backward.

The guard sighed with exaggerated indifference. "Look, if you're going to fight, take it off my nice clean stone. Blood leaves stains."

"Oh for the love of – enough already!" Morrigan exploded, and threw out her hands. Instantly, the air seemed to contract around the unfortunate man, warping in the extreme change of temperature as snowflakes crystallized around him. He looked merely surprised, until he slowly toppled over backward and shattered on the stone.

"I apologize for that," Wynne said to the astonished guard, casting an exasperated look at our apostate. "If you sweep him up before he thaws, he won't leave a mess. Rocky, no! Don't eat that, you don't know where he's been!"

"That was a good one," I said to Morrigan, who preened.

"Right," said the guard, recovering. "You, Ralok, get a broom. Now, Wardens, I'd love to help you, but if you're looking for the King, you'll be looking for a long time. He's dead, and the assembly's yet to pick a new one."

"Dead? And no new king?" I blinked in surprise. The idea of Orzammar without a King was impossible - didn't noble government just sort of _happen_, whether you wanted it or not, like mold on bread?

"Wonderful," Morrigan turned her face up to the sky in mute appeal, possibly for a lightning bolt to strike down all these fools. "Can nobody solve their own problems? I suppose we shall be expected to pick a king _for_ them?'

"Between you and me, duster," the guard leaned toward me and lowered his voice. "You might do a better job. Neither of the men in the running are as pure as gold, if you catch my meaning."

I frowned, worried. "Who's in the running? Actually, never mind. I wouldn't know them if you told me. Thanks for the help, Warrior...?"

He grinned, teeth flashing in the sunlight under his dense black beard. "Grenich. Just Grenich. You been an inspiration, Warden. The duster who escaped Dust Town. Convinced me to take this job, in fact. This posting's been declared part of the surface, so it's not covered by the prohibition against dusters doin' real work. Made sergeant in my first week when the other sergeant came out second-best in a brawl with a bear."

Alistair clapped me on the back as I stood there in shock. "Wow. I... don't know what to say. Congratulations?"

"Thanks," said Grenich, already turning a huge winch to open the stone gates. "If you're fixing on going home, though, you ought to know not everyone sees things as I do. Not everyone will be happy to see the woman who killed Bherat. Just a fair warning."

"Thanks again," I called back, already dashing through the widening gap and into the warm darkness inside.

The Hall of Heroes was unusually dimly lit, and the elevator attendant was asleep in the corner, no doubt due to the lack of traffic. He jumped at the sound of Alistair's boots on the polished stone floor and tried to pretend he hadn't been dozing.

Morrigan balked at the entrance to the elevator, looking back over her shoulder at the glinting of sunlight through the stone gates, the band of pale gold narrowing until, with a final grinding _clunk,_ the gates were closed behind us. She clenched her hand on her staff, visibly steeled herself and stepped into the elevator.

The attendant fiddled with the controls, pulling a long lever with a knob on the end until it clanged into position over a diamond symbol. "No, we'll go to the Commons first, please," I interrupted him, and he nodded and heaved the lever to a lower setting.

The floor dropped out from under us with a lurch and the sound of rushing water, and we all grabbed instinctively for the handrails. It was comical to watch Alistair throw his hand out only to find the rail a foot lower than he'd expected it, and even more fun when that meant he staggered against Zevran.

"Hello, there," he smirked up at Alistair, hanging on to the rail with both hands to keep from being squashed under the bigger man.

Alistair pushed himself off and put a hand on the wall for balance. "Sorry."

"You know, you needn't resort to subterfuge to get close to me," Zevran purred, leaning towards him until their shoulders touched. "We both knew it was only a matter of time until you could no longer resist me. Don't fight it, my friend."

"Eurgh," Alistair grimaced, blushing. "Zev, you know I'm not – I'm not, um-"

"Yessss?"

"You know what?" Alistair gave a resigned sigh. "You saw right through me. I burn for you, Zev. My heart beats only for you. Take me now."

"Gladly!" Zev cried, slinging his pack off his shoulder and bending to open it. "I'm sure I have my scented oils in here somewhere..."

The elevator lurched to a halt and its operator lunged to open the doors with desperate haste. He shooed us out into the Commons and slammed the doors behind us, muttering, "Surfacer perverts."

The heat rose up and rolled over us, loosening our muscles and causing a general throwing-back of cloaks and removal of gloves. Only slightly less powerful was the noise, echoing and re-echoing off the stone walls as merchants hollered for attention, criers shouted the news of the day, and passers-by carried on their conversations. The warm orange glow of the lava suffused everything and lent its slightly acrid scent to the dry air, mingling with spices, roasting meat, burning oil, ale, and an underlying tang of sweat and garbage waiting for disposal.

I grabbed Alistair's hand and dragged him through the crowd to the edge of the level, all the way to the low stone wall that was all that lay between us and our distant, fiery deaths in the lava below. "Look up and down," I urged.

He craned his neck up toward the high-end districts, then leaned down and shaded his eyes to peer at the dingy lower levels. "So this is Orzammar," he said at last, in an awed voice. "It's huge! I guess I was expecting... well, a hole in the ground."

"It _is_ a hole in the ground," I said, grinning. "It's the very _best_ hole in the ground."

The others filtered through the press and mimicked his actions, peering around at the city. Morrigan tapped a finger against her chin and mused, "If there is anything complimentary to be said about your people, 'tis that they possess a remarkable facility for carving stone."

I blinked at her, then spotted the glint in her eye and laughed. "Yeah, and just the other day, Morrigan, I was thinking _you_ might have some capability with magic, though of course I might be wrong."

"What a remarkable amount of lava. Does anyone ever fall in?" Zevran asked, then gave me a sly sidelong glance. "And are they already dead when they do?"

"Yes, and yes." I started toward the exit, and the stairs that led down to Dust Town. "It's a great way to get rid of suspicious bodies. Come on, I need to make sure my family is all right before we do anything else."

"Can we look around a little?" Leliana asked, twisting her neck to try to take in all the shopping options at once.

"Later."

Too urgent in my need to see my family was all right even to stop for some of the delicious-smelling nug kabob, I set a fast pace across the Commons to the grubby elevator to Dust Town. It had long ago ceased to function because the smiths had refused to maintain it, and the dusters had instead built a sort of switchbacked staircase through the elevator shaft down to our level. Before I let them inside, I paused and said to Alistair, "You'd better wear your helmet. The ceilings are really low here."

"Thanks," he said, dropping his helmet onto his head. About halfway down the stairs I heard a loud clang and a grunt, and looked over my shoulder to see Alistair hang onto the railing for a second after having whacked his helmeted head on a beam. He gave me a wry smile and Morrigan snorted with laughter.

Emerging from the shaft, I made a beeline across the central square of Dust Town, ignoring the startled stares of its denizens. I was almost jogging now, every other step a sort of skip, and Rocky sensed my excitement, prancing along beside me and watching my face, trying to figure out what we were excited about.

We arrived at my house and I burst through the door, mouth open to call out a greeting, but the words died on my lips. The house was obviously empty. Everything was covered in dust and my family's few possessions were gone. A scattering of garbage and fresh graffiti showed that some opportunists had recently used it for crash space. Rocky pushed past me and began to snuffle the new smells.

I ran into the bedroom and back again, panic filling my lungs until I fought to breathe. Alistair was still standing on the threshold, bent over to frown at the scene. Zevran was out in the street, looking around with an interested expression, and the women were still clustered at the other side of the square by the stairs, apparently trying not to touch anything.

"What-" Alistair began, but I cut him off.

"They're gone! All their stuff is gone! Ancestors save them, they must be dead, where else could they have gone to? Beraht's men must have killed them to punish me for betraying him!" I felt my face crumple and ducked my head, covering my eyes. Alistair wrapped his arms around me and pressed my head to his chest, stroking my hair.

"Eh? Brosca?"

A familiar voice came from outside, and I pulled away from Alistair, wiping my face on my sleeve. I leaned out the door and looked around for the woman I remembered.

"Down here," she said dryly, and I looked down at the huddled mass of blankets tucked into the dark corner at the end of the street. "Yeah, it's me. You looking for your sister?"

"Yeah! Have you seen her?" I jumped down the front step and ran to crouch down in front of her. The formerly lithe and athletic professional burglar was now gaunt, her hair shot with gray and her eyes, once so clever and bright, were now guarded and fever-glazed. When Rocky loped after me and leaned down to sniff, she shrank from him and I waved him away, frowning. "What happened to you, Nedezda?"

"Jarvia happened," she said, her tone matter-of-fact. "Hung me out to dry when a dub went wrong. Guards caught me cracking Vintana's place, I looked for my backup and it wasn't there. I got lucky," she gave a laugh, followed by a wet cough, "they didn't kill me. Broke my knees instead."

"Stone take her," I muttered, then turned to shout, "Morrigan! I have a job for you!"

She sauntered over, eying the disreputable pile of blankets with distaste, and held out her hands from several feet away, closing her eyes in concentration for a moment. "I can tell from over here that there is little I can do. The wounds are old and well-festered. But..." She swung her bag off her shoulders and thrust it at Alistair to hold for her, rather than set it onto the filthy ground, and rifled through it until she found a green leather bag. "Here. More of what I gave you, remember? For the fever. 'Tis likely to cure your... friend... of any lingering infection, and her tuberculosis as well."

She rattled off a list of instructions for dosing and brewing, while Nadezda blinked at her in astonishment and I tried not to fidget too obviously. Nadezda seemed to know something about my sister, and I was trying hard not to imagine what it might be – for example, the location of the lava pool that had become her final resting place.

"I don't know what to say, except you're a right square cove, duster," she said after Morrigan had finished talking and stalked away, complaining of dwarven stink.

"No problem," I said distractedly. "Were you going to tell me about Rica?"

"Yeah, yeah. Sorry." She cleared her throat and spat. "'At's better. Your Rica got her big break, girl. She's shacking up in the diamond district. You can – hey, wait!"

"Thanks, Naddie! Feel better!" I shouted over my shoulder, already bolting for the stairs, Alistair and Rocky in hot pursuit.

The others had clustered near the exit, acting casual while backing slowly towards the stairs, even as three different packs of dusters gradually encircled them with unconvincing nonchalance. "Oh, for the love of the ancestors," I snapped at the lurkers in the shadows. "You'll be dead before you even _see_ their gold. Greg, Zosh," I addressed the ones I knew by name, "you're not that stupid. Sod off."

Zoshi had the grace to look embarrassed as he slunk away, but Greghen's eyes blazed with fury when he recognized me. He didn't say anything, and I didn't wait to hear him, but gathered my friends and ran upstairs two at a time. _Greg's brother was Bherat's bodyguard,_ I remembered. _Sod it, I killed his brother. _

On the way back through the Commons, we passed a brutish display of what passed for politics in Orzammar as two rival gangs, each supporting a different candidate for the throne, attacked each other viciously in the street. The guards broke up the fight quickly, but a bloody heap on the paving stones showed the grim results of the encounter. Morrigan snorted with disgust, and Alistair and Wynne looked shocked.

"They fight and kill each other while the Blight threatens to destroy their city!" Wynne exclaimed in disbelief.

"You would think they would be more concerned about their dwindling population than to throw lives away like this," Zevran noted, bending to examine one of the dead. "Aha! Not just fools, but _rich_ fools." He palmed a jingling pouch of coins and sidled away before the city guards returned to clean up the dead.

"We will have to put a stop to this before the armies will follow us," I said. "They will be too wrapped-up in their vying for power. The nobles are always like this, though not usually so bad - they don't usually kill - but there's a reason why all the nobles wear chainmail, and it's not just because it's shiny."

The elevator to the Diamond Quarter was, naturally, working perfectly and spotlessly clean, an elegant mosaic covering the floor and soft blue lighting emanating from the carefully cultivated lyrium-eating fungus. When the elevator doors glided open, they revealed the immaculate street and towering stone palaces of the Diamond Quarter. I stepped out and now it was my turn to gawk at everything. While I was standing there with my mouth hanging open, I heard running feet behind and spun around to face the newcomer.

* * *

_Orzammar! WHEEEE!_

_...*ahem* Thanks for reading, and especially for taking the time to review – your kindness is inspiring! Thanks also to mille libri, my fabulous beta, for reminding me that I'm not writing a thesis on the ecology of fungi._


	55. House Aeducan

There was my sister, as stunning as ever, jewels glittering at her throat and wrists and at the trim of her elegant gown. Her face had subtly changed, her beauty almost luminescent, with a new softness and gentleness around the eyes.

"Rica!" I cried, overjoyed.

"Latitia!" She threw her arms around me. "I heard there was a Gray Warden in the city and I hoped it would be you. Oh, I have the most incredible news. I've borne a son for _Prince_ Bhelen Aeducan!"

I held her tightly, squeezing my eyes shut against tears. "Rica, that is amazing-"

"_And_," she went on excitedly, pulling back a little to beam at me, "he's moved me and Mother into the royal palace! They say I'm Bhelen's _favorite_ concubine. Oh, he's so beautiful, 'Tisha, I would have brought him to see you but I'm not allowed to take him from the royal nursery."

I blinked as I tried to follow this. "Assuming we're talking about the baby now, and not Bhelen, why can't you take him with you? He's your son."

"Oh, it's not like that." She released me and waved her hands placatingly. "It's just so dangerous on the streets right now. Bhelen's afraid Harrowmont might try something – that's the other candidate for the throne. He tried to frame Bhelen for his brother's death, but I know better. Bhelen cried for weeks after his brother died. It could never have been him. He is the rightful king, not Harrowmont."

_And, of course, if he loses, Harrowmont will throw you all out on the streets - if you're lucky_, I thought. Out loud, I said, "Well, then we had definitely better make sure Bhelen wins the throne. Can you take me to see him? Let's get this farce over with."

"Oh, but who are your friends? They're so... big... " she faltered a bit, looking at Rocky's bulk and then up (a long way up, past a lot of armor and armament) to Alistair's helmeted head.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, you guys," I said, turning to beckon them forward. "This is my sister, Rica-"

"We gathered," Morrigan said dryly.

"Rica, that's Morrigan, a mage of highest caliber," I said, pointing. Morrigan's lips quirked almost into a smile, but not quite. Rica curtsied.

"And beside her is Wynne, also a mage and renowned as a healer," I went on.

"It is a pleasure to meet you," Wynne smiled warmly. "Latitia has missed you dearly."

"Next up is Zevran, an assassin from Antiva." I noticed Rica staring at his ears and added in an undertone, "He's an elf."

"Oh! Of course, how rude of me to stare," she exclaimed, and started to drop another curtsy, but Zev's hand snaked out and caught hers, bringing it to his mouth.

"I understand completely, my lady," he murmured, his lips brushing her fingers. "I often have that effect on women. Especially such lovely ones as yourself." He kissed her hand and relinquished it, observing with relish the way she blushed pink.

I rolled my eyes at him. "Bhelen will have your head on a pike, Zev, and if you screw this up for her, I'll be the one holding the pike. Anyway. The pretty redhead is Leliana, a Chantry lay sister with hidden talents and an excellent singing voice."

"Hello," Leliana said with a sweet smile.

Next I gestured for Rocky to come closer. "This big guy here is Rocky, he's a real mabari. You can pet him. Rocky, let Rica pet you, there's a good boy." Rica reached out one hand very hesitantly and patted him once on the top of the head. Rocky dog-smiled and wagged his stubby tail.

"And _this_," I concluded, hooking my arm through Alistair's and pulling him forward, "...is Alistair, my fellow Gray Warden."

"Hi," he said, and gave a short, awkward bow when she curtsied to him.

"So that's everyone," I told her. "Now let's go get your Bhelen's arse on the throne, shall we?"

She wrapped her arm around my waist and I laid mine across her shoulders and off we went, my friends trailing along behind, looking around and above them at the daring architecture and the gems that glowed in the carvings that decorated the walls. "So this Alistair," Rica whispered to me, glancing back at him over her shoulder. "Saved for last? Introduced with a... _significant pause_?" She winked, and I grinned.

"Yeah, something like that. It's kind of..." I sighed, momentarily distracted from my pleasure at seeing my sister so healthy and well. "Complicated, is the only word for it. We're just taking it one day at a time."

"Hey, even _one_ day with a man like _that_ is something to fight for." She glanced back at him again, and this time he noticed and smiled at her, making her giggle in that adorable way of hers, all dimples and sparkle.

"Hands off, I saw him first. Anyway, I don't think he's ready for you – a night with you, and his head would explode." I lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper and added, "He was a _virgin_, you know."

"_Was_? Way to go, girl!" she cried. Then her merry eyes turned serious, and her arm tightened around my waist. "Really."

I smiled and looked away, blinking when my eyes stung a little, and gave her shoulder a squeeze.

"We're here," she said then, pulling away and approaching the door guard.

"Rica," the guard said, giving her a nod.

"This is my sister, the Gray Warden," she said, curtsying _again_. Apparently I was going to have to learn how to do that. "May I escort her and her party to the Wardens guest suite?"

He nodded again, and went back to staring impassively out at the street. We filed past him and directly into the royal palace, and I suppressed a little shiver of excitement and fear at our audacity.

The palace had been surprisingly plain on the outside, built out of heavy gray stone as if to withstand a siege. The interior, however, glistened with inlaid tile, carpet, and beautiful crystals set behind glass in the walls and lit from within by the blue fungus. Rica led us confidently past the royal guards, who ignored us, and into an interior bedchamber twice the size of our entire Dust Town home.

"Wow, this is lush," I said, looking around.

"We – that is, the royal family keeps a suite of rooms like this with human-sized furniture, for when the Gray Wardens visit," she explained, rubbing her hands against her skirt with nervous excitement. "I'll just – I'll go see if Bhelen is busy."

"Not too busy for the Gray Wardens," came a voice from the doorway, and we all turned quickly to see a heavily armored dwarf whose subtle touches of gold and engraving marked him as someone special. He strode directly to Alistair and held out his hand. "I'm Bhelen Aeducan. Welcome to Orzammar."

Bhelen turned out to be a surprisingly young and virile man, with a luxuriant beard and open face. He greeted the others warmly and explained the situation to us. Apparently, the assembly voters had hung in the balance for weeks, and Harrowmont had undermined Bhelen's support at every turn with bribery and slander.

"The Assembly must make a majority vote," Bhelen continued, "and I doubt that will ever be possible at this rate. What we need is a Paragon. Her vote would outweigh the entire Assembly and make me King overnight."

"I assume you mean Branka, but she's been gone for ages," I pointed out.

"Yes, she has. We've been looking for her, but so has Harrowmont. If he finds her first, we're in trouble. That's why I need you: The Gray Wardens are the only ones who can move freely in the Deep Roads without fear of the taint, and you could easily find her before any ordinary dwarf could do so. Find her, and bring her back to vote for _me_." He punched one first into his hand for emphasis, and I listened to the subtext: _And if she won't vote for me, you better make sure she doesn't come back. _

I swallowed hard. The Deep Roads? I hadn't made an expedition for almost a year. I really hoped Rica had brought my maps with her when she moved. And my camouflage, grappling hook, chalk, bait... I'd just have to trust that Bhelen would give me any supplies I asked for.

"All right, my Lord," I said at last, inclining my head. "And may I add, thank you for caring for my family. I hope Rica brings you many fine sons, and that your house grows stronger by them."

Bhelen smiled, and he looked genuinely happy. "Your sister is a fine woman, and she has brought me much joy already. You and your companions are welcome to stay here." Then, to my surprise, he held out both fists, thumbs up. I returned his twin hammer sign and looked questioningly at his face.

"I am not so backward as some of the others in the noble castes," he said gently. "I hope to allow the casteless to contribute more to this city. The time has come for _all _our people to work together and grow stronger by our unity."

I smiled and nodded, but bowed anyway, fists crossed over my chest in respect, before Bhelen turned and left the room with his unobtrusive bodyguards jingling along in his wake.

I turned to Rica immediately and clasped her hands. "So when do we get to meet the little Prince?" I asked her excitedly.

"Right now!" She took my hand and started to lead us out, but paused. "You, uh... You should leave your kit here. Nobody's allowed to bring weapons into the nursery."

The guest rooms lay at the end of the hall, past various rooms for ambassadors and other members of the royal family - including other concubines, but I noted that none of their rooms were as large or positioned as closely to the royal apartments as the one Rica pointed out as hers. The nursery sat next to the treasury and guarded almost as heavily. Four stalwart dwarves stood implacably in front of the nursery door, shoulder-to-shoulder and utterly immovable.

"Astyth's tits, forget stone blocks – we should be building our walls out of guys like that," I whispered to Rica, who giggled, pleased at the protection given her son.

"Nobody allowed in without Lord Bhelen's written permission," said the warrior with the most gold on his heavy helmet. "Sorry, miss. Not even Gray Wardens. Or their... pets." He turned his head slightly, the hidden eyes probably looking at Rocky, but they could just as easily have included the entire party of surfacers.

"Oh," Rica faltered, glancing back at our group. Leliana and Wynne looked disappointed, Zevran and Morrigan impassive, and Alistair was just watching with interest. "I – I'm sorry, I forgot, I should have asked Bhelen when he was here. I don't like to interrupt him when he's working, but maybe-"

"Don't worry about it," I waved off her embarrassment. "We'll see my new nephew soon enough. It's good to know he's safe, and I don't want to get you in trouble for bugging Bhelen."

Her face relaxed in a relieved smile. "Okay. I'll just feed Endrin, then – oh! That's his name, my _son_." She lingered over the word with obvious pleasure. "Anyway, I'll feed him and then I'll come get you and we can catch up for a few hours until Bhelen's done working."

She bustled inside and we heard her joyful voice as she greeted her boy. The guards were giving us the hairy eyeball, so I turned and led us back to the Wardens' quarters.

"How delightfully domestic," Zevran observed as we walked. "I almost find it hard to believe the mighty, powerful, well-bearded Lord Bhelen even had occasion to meet her, much less fall in love with her."

"I don't know if he loves her," I said, pushing the door open to the room Rica'd shown us. "It honestly doesn't make any difference. She's given him a son, and noble and warrior castes are so grateful for sons, many families will gladly take in a casteless mother to care for their new boy. It's still a little bit scandalous, though."

"I wonder why our new friend was willing to risk it." Zevran crossed to the sinfully large bed and flung himself across it, propping his head on his hand. Rocky leaped up and flopped beside him in an identical attitude of repose, his tongue lolling out happily.

I gave him an amused look. "Bhelen's got a reputation for... open-mindedness, I guess. Bherat had other words for him, but none I'd care to repeat in his own palace. He likes nice things, and he doesn't much care whether they came from Dust Town or the Diamond Quarter. Or the surface, for that matter."

We busied ourselves unpacking and exploring the suite. The room Rica had given us was one of several, joined together in the middle by a common room with an actual fireplace, stocked with coal and a few precious pieces of firewood to give familiar comfort to the Wardens. We also noticed a distinct lack of sharp objects, and most of the furniture had rounded corners, the walkways wider than strictly necessary, and the bathtubs (each room had its own!) had handrails set into their sides.

Alistair sat on the edge of a bed and ran a finger over the rounded, padded footboard, his eyes dimming. Seeing my concerned look, he sighed and explained, "The Wardens come down here to die in battle with the darkspawn. You remember that, right? I guess... I guess some of them are pretty far gone when they do. This place is practically baby-proofed."

I climbed up next to him and leaned on his arm. "Don't worry, we'll die a glorious death long before then. Or maybe a hilarious death. Death by naughty lingerie? Death by darkspawn _wearing_ naughty lingerie!"

"Actually, I was thinking about Duncan," he said quietly, ignoring my attempt to cheer him up. "He said he was having the nightmares again. That he didn't have long before his Calling would take him. I guess Loghain spared him that."

"Even the blackest dross can contain a grain of gold," I told him. "It hardly excuses him."

A dainty knock at the door, and Rica danced in, beaming. "We have probably two hours before he gets hungry again, and by then Bhelen will be ready for dinner I think. What do you want to do?"

"I want to hear all about how you were swept off your feet by a young, handsome prince!" I scooted backward to the head of the bed and leaned back on the pillows, patting the mattress beside me.

"I'll give you ladies some privacy. I need a bath anyway." Alistair smiled at Rica. "I've been hearing about dwarven plumbing since I first met your sister, and I'm eager to try it out."

He left, shutting the door behind him, and Rica climbed up on the bed to lean on the pillows. "By the ancestors, this bed is huge. Have you been sleeping on-"

"I missed you so much," I burst out. "Stone, Rica, I thought you were dead. I thought I'd killed you by being such a stupid ass." My voice cracked and I bent to press my forehead into her shoulder when I felt my face flush.

"I missed you, too, cookie." She put her arms around me and for a moment we clung to each other. "The merchants brought all kinds of bad news. They said there's a Blight, and the humans are losing."

"They are." I sniffled and pulled away a little to wipe my nose on my sleeve. "Their government can't get their act together, and they let all the other Wardens and their own King get killed in the first big fight. It's the dumbest thing, Rica. They're as bad as the nobles down here. Alistair... Alistair's the only one left."

"And you," Rica said, petting my hair. I snuggled a little lower in the pillows and leaned on her shoulder again, and it was almost like I'd never left. Except this was a much nicer bed.

"I guess. I barely count." I shrugged with the shoulder that wasn't pressed against my sister. "I'm mostly moral support. He has no idea how awesome he is, he's always looking for someone else to follow."

"What have you been doing?" she asked curiously.

"Walking." I snorted with self-deprecating amusement. "Lots and lots of walking, except when we're fighting for our lives. Seriously, my hair should be as red as yours – I can't believe that much blood just washes off." I shuddered. The walls that usually kept bad feelings at bay were weak now, in the warmth of my sister's arms, and for a vivid moment I was back in the Harrowing Chamber, soaked in gore and trying to ignore my own pain and panic long enough to help put Alistair's arm back together.

And then it was all pouring out of me. All the fear and uncertainty, the doubt I'd felt as I struggled to navigate the surface world and the people in it. And, one by one, the momentous events of the past few months, the true horror of which I'd locked away out of necessity, but now bubbled up in choking, gasping sobs. Rica made soothing sounds and rubbed my back, and wisely didn't ask questions when I wasn't making sense, which was probably most of the time.

"So," I hiccuped, beginning to calm down out of sheer emotional exhaustion, "I'd have to say, it was either seeing all those hunger demons eating that poor Templar alive, or when Daveth and Jory died and I still had to drink the darkspawn blood."

"What was?"

"Oh, I'm trying to decide what was the worst, scariest, grossest thing that happened," I giggled. Somehow I'd ended up with my head in Rica's lap. She wordlessly handed me another handkerchief from the box beside the bed in response to the edge of hysteria in my laughter, and I took it and wiped my face, trying to focus on practical reality, on the _now_.

"Not the dragon, eh? I think I'd have been more scared of the dragon," she said matter-of-factly.

"She was pretty cool, actually. _Really_ big, like, so big you can hardly wrap your mind around something that massive even existing, mush less being alive." I sat up, frowning. "And flying. I have no idea how she flies."

"Dragons are magic," she shrugged.

A soft knock came from the door, and Alistair opened it and leaned in, his brow creased with concern. "Bhelen invited us to have dinner with him in his room, in fifteen minutes. Are you... Should I tell the messenger you're indisposed?"

"Do I look that awful? Actually, don't answer that." I hopped off the bed and started toward my pack. "I'll just wash my face and put on clean clothes first."

"Okay." He left, and I heard him talking to the messenger out in the hall.

"I should go to little Endrin before dinner," Rica said, pushing herself off the bed.

"Aww, Rica, I'm sorry," I said suddenly, stopping with my shirt halfway off. "I didn't let you get a word in edgewise. I still really want to know all about Bhelen and your baby. And – Astyth's arse, is Mam here? Is Leske?"

Her pretty face clouded. "Mam is. She's... the same. The only difference to her is the quality of the ale. Leske stayed in Dust Town. I told Bhelen that Leske and I were just friends, but he didn't want other men hanging around."

"That's understandable," I nodded and finished pulling on a clean shirt. "If unfortunate. Hey, where's he living? I went to our old place and it was empty."

"I don't know," she said sadly. "I haven't seen him in ages. Bhelen doesn't like me leaving the Diamond District without him, and of course Leske can't come here."

I found a washcloth in the wardrobe and a pitcher of water on the nightstand, and began washing my face. "I hope he's okay. I'll ask Bhelen if we have to leave right away, or if it's okay for me to go looking for him. And I'd like Alistair to get into some new armor. Can you believe he wears that stuff? It's a death trap – it's full of holes!"

"I wouldn't know," she said, amused.

"Right." I looked up and grinned at her. "You're the kinder, gentler half of the family. Take my word for it, he's lucky we've been fighting monsters and dumbasses, rather than sneaky buggers like me."

Bhelen's "room" turned out to be a sumptuous combination of dining room and living room, with a long table and chairs on one end and,on the other, a semicircle of sinfully plush couches and giant pillows. When I set my eyes on the feast laid out before us, including a whole roast nug with an apple in its mouth, I groaned aloud. The heartfelt sound was echoed by Alistair, and Bhelen grinned, beckoning us to sit down and get started.

"It's always satisfying to lay table for Gray Wardens," he said complacently, leaning back in his chair and smirking as we plowed through the table. I eyed him from behind the nug shank I was gnawing; he'd changed out of his armor and into a soft, loose tunic with a subtle sheen, open at the neck to reveal a heavy gold chain and a luxuriant growth of chest hair.

"So this is nug," Alistair said, when his mouth was clear enough to speak. It had been a _long_ time since lunch. "It's not bad. Very tender."

"I can't eat it. I feel so bad for the poor nug," Leliana said in a small voice, causing me to snort my drink up my nose. Alistair pounded me on the back as I coughed and tried not to laugh too hard at the idea of refusing good meat out of pity.

The meal included a lot of surface food, actually, not just the apple – foods which I recognized, and complimented Bhelen on, which seemed to please him. When we'd finished and Bhelen's unobtrusive servants had carried away the dishes, he invited us to get comfortable on the couches and talk about "how things stand."

"But first," he said cheerfully, "let me offer you all some wine. It's so rare that I have guests who can appreciate it, though your sister has been indulging me lately by sharing a bit. I like ale as much as the next dwarf, but wine is such a pleasure."

He poured generous glasses for Leliana, Wynne, Zevran and himself; Alistair excused himself by confessing he wouldn't be able to appreciate it, and Morrigan was sitting by herself in a corner, looking like she was barely holding on to human form with the stress of being underground.

"May I see the bottle? Ah, I know the vintage. Very fine, very fine indeed," Zevran purred, setting the bottle down on a sidebar and holding the glass up to the lamp to admire the color of the liquid within.

"Oh, it is good," Leliana said, sounding a bit surprised. Wynne nodded, her glass already half-empty. Bhelen grinned in a self-satisfied way and lounged comfortably on a couch, throwing an arm around Rica, who gave him a sticky-sweet smile and returned his kiss with interest.

"Do you want to try it?" he offered, holding his glass out to her.

She giggled and cocked her head adorably. "Maybe a little – you know I can't have much, with the baby. Bhelen, dearest, do you think maybe we could bring him here to meet-"

"Do not drink that!"

Zevran's ringing command brought all our heads up in shocked attention. He was on his feet and grabbing everyone's glasses out of his hands, tossing them directly into the garbage chute, including Bhelen's.

The Aeducan lord jumped up, outraged. "What in the name of the Paragons is wrong with your elf?" he demanded of me.

"Nothing is wrong with _me_," Zevran said calmly. "_I _did not drink the wine. You, however, will become very familiar with the latrines over the next twelve hours or so. The wine was poisoned – rather cliché, in my professional opinion, but there it is."

* * *

_Oh noes! Who could possibly be behind this? Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick?_

_...All silliness aside, Merry Christmas! And I mean that for everyone, because even if you don't celebrate, you still deserve to have a nice day on the 25th of December :)_

_Thanks to mille libri for catching my dumb mistakes, and to all of you for reading – you are the best Christmas present!_


	56. Nice Place You Have Here

_Phew, for some reason this one gave me a lot of trouble. It's finally been brought to life courtesy of a very long layover in La Guardia airport and incredibly prompt beta-reading by the fantastic mille libri :D_

* * *

"Poison?" Bhelen roared directly into Zevran's face.

Our assassin didn't flinch. "Yes. I am familiar with the brew: A slight scent of lemon, the faintest tinge of purple. This wine should be clear red, but it is burgundy. And," he gave a slight smile, "the ingredients are sourced in the Deep Roads, making it readily available in your hometown."

"They go too far," Bhelen fumed. He began storming around the room, waving his hands in the air as though mere words could not express his outrage. "Endangering my guests? My -" he broke off, his eyes widening with shock, "Had Rica drunk it, would the poison have passed to my son?"

"I do not know," Zevran admitted, shifting uncomfortably. "But-"

"What a sneaking, cowardly, _unprofessional_ grit-humper," I burst out. "What a stupid and ham-fisted attack! Bhelen – Lord Bhelen, I mean – this won't stand. We can't leave Rica - and you - here alone and run off after Branka. Who knows what they'll try next? Can you really trust the guards protecting Endrin? Anyone can be bribed."

Before Bhelen could answer, Leliana chimed in, one finger tapping her delicate chin. "Where did you buy the wine, my lord? Perhaps the merchant could be... persuaded to share what he knows."

"It was Harrowmont, I'm sure of it. This is exactly that his style. Sneaking, underhanded business. Just like when he murdered my brother and had my sister exiled, and cast the blame on _me_." Bhelen shook his head like an angry bull. "But if you want to look anyway, the merchant was Figor's Imports."

"Then that's where we'll go," I said decisively. "Right now."

"With all due respect, Lord Aeducan," Zevran interjected, "you may wish to retire. Soon. Preferably before the vomiting starts."

Rica paled. "Is there nothing you can do to help him?"

"Worry not," Zevran flashed his brilliantly white teeth at her. "Everyone should be fine. I expect the victim would have needed to drink two full glasses before the dose would be dangerous – another way in which this amateur failed." He sniffed.

"Fine," Bhelen bit out. "I suppose I'll see you at some point tomorrow. Assuming I'm still alive. In the meantime, feel free to send any equipment bills to my House, I know you'll need supplies for the expedition. Use House Turana for smithing. And don't assassinate Harrowmont. Believe it or not, that's frowned upon, and I can't afford that right now, not with all the rumors about my brother's death."

"I want Zevran to stay with you," I said quickly, before he left through the door to his private rooms. Then I caught myself and added, "I mean, if that's all right with you, my lord. I'd rather not leave you alone and ill."

"Ugh." Bhelen wrinkled his prodigious nose in disgust. "I do _not_ need more witnesses while I vomit up my toenails. Your elf can stay as the subject matter expert, but please, for the sake of my wounded dignity, the rest of you sleep in the Warden quarters. They aren't far away, after all."

He turned and stomped into his room, gesturing for Rica to follow him. She wrung her hands. "I should go," she whispered. "I'm not his only concubine, and if I'm not there for him while he's ill, someone else will be. I'm Endrin's mother and that won't change, but Mardy is pregnant, and..."

"We'll be fine," I said, shooing her after him. "We'll go ask some questions, and then we'll just wander around loose in the castle and harangue servants, pilfer food, and make off with small valuables."

She gave me a wry smile and scurried off, and I kept my easy-going smile until the door closed. At that point I turned from the door with a scowl and stalked out of Bhelen's overstuffed living room, the lushness of it suddenly disgusting.

"I can't believe Bhelen even _has_ other concubines," I complained to Alistair, who jogged a few steps to catch up to me after my abrupt departure. "Look at her! How could any other woman compete?"

"Men like variety," Zevran said from behind me, making me jump. He caught my irritated look and explained, "I intend to retrieve my gear, after which I'll return to my new role as counter-assassin."

Leliana and Wynne went straight to their rooms, and Morrigan made to do the same. I called her back. "Morrigan, come with us, please. You can go as a wolf if you don't want people staring at you, they'll just think you're a dog."

She nodded and blurred directly into her great gray wolf, shaking her fur to settle it more neatly and looking a little more comfortable now that nobody could expect her to converse or obey etiquette. Alistair and I climbed into our armor, just in case.

"All right, Alistair, let's go." I turned, patting my leg for Rocky to follow. "I know where Figor's is, Bherat used it as a front a couple times. On the way we'll stop in at the Steel Quarter and look for this House Turana, I want them to get started fitting you for new armor right away."

"But this is my Gray Warden armor," he protested. "Duncan-"

"They'll put a Gray Warden crest on it for you," I cut him off sharply. "You're not going to get yourself killed because of some sentimental attachment to a suit of metal. You can't tell me Duncan would like that."

"Okay," he sighed.

The elevator opened a minute or two later onto the Steel Quarter, the home of the smith caste. I hadn't spent much time here, at least not in the main street; I'd poked around in the alleys and dumpsters plenty, looking for any usable bits of scrap. The smells of leather, oil and Branka's smokeless coal hung in a cloud over the street, ringing hammerfalls making a kind of music over the everyday bustle. A steel sign located conveniently near the elevator entrance was decorated with embossed and inlaid gold spelling out _Turana _in the old runes; it took me a minute, squinting, to decipher it, before we pushed open the door to the workshop's front room.

A little bell tinkled to announce our arrival, and a girl of maybe nine years trotted out, wiping her hands on her apron. "Yes?"

"I want to commission a suit of light plate for one of House Aeducan's human allies. Specifically, this human here." I gestured toward Alistair, who grinned. The girl nodded and scurried away.

Alistair's grin didn't fade. He leaned down and nudged me, whispering, "She's so tiny and cute! She's just like a little doll – or a kitten!"

"No, you can't keep her," I scolded. "Her parents wouldn't like it if you started carrying their daughter around in your pocket and calling her Miss Pretty-Woogums."

Morrigan snorted and went to lie down in a corner, turning her back on us and curling her tail over her eyes to spare herself from our foolishness.

A short, heavily muscled man emerged then, his face and hands black with soot though he was industriously scrubbing them with a damp cloth. He went up to Alistair and bowed to him, crossing his arms over his chest respectfully, and said, "I am Kamgar Turana. What can I do for you, my lord? Any ally of my sponsor house has full access to any service I or my workers can provide."

Alistair glanced at me uncertainly. "Well, I don't know, Latitia insisted I needed new armor and brought me here."

"Latitia?" Kamgar squinted at me and frowned at my brand. "I assume you have a permit to be carrying weapons and armor?"

"We're Gray Wardens," I said shortly. "So, yes. We're going into the Deep Roads and we need the work done asap, to my specifications. I need the joints muffled so they don't clink, and I need you to make the boots soft-soled. Dark enamel with a matte finish so it doesn't shine. Can you do that?"

"Matte finish?" Alistair said sadly, looking down at his polished breastplate.

"I don't know, miss, that's an awfully tall order." The smith's brow wrinkled in thought. "I could have something suitable made for you in a couple months-"

"The Blight will be _over_ in a couple months!" I exploded. "And that's _if_ we aren't all dead because we had lousy equipment! What can you give me by the end of tomorrow?"

"Warden, I am a craftsman," Kamgar said stiffly.

"And I'm a brand who doesn't give a nug's arse about your craftsman's ego." I leaned closer and lowered my voice. "Any _artisan_ can make armor pretty. Only a skilled _smith_ could do what I'm asking you to do. Now, are you going to rise to this challenge, or is Bhelen's champion going to die in the Deep Roads because you just aren't good enough?"

Kamgar glared at me, momentarily struck dumb by my sheer audacity. It was as though a rat had sat up and started criticizing his beard. Then he turned deliberately toward Alistair as though erasing the past few seconds from his memory. "Warden, I can alter a pre-made suit of heavy chainmail if you allow me to take your measurements immediately. I'm not proud of giving a customer something so short of perfect, but it will be a great improvement over your current... state."

"Great," Alistair said, and began unbuckling his armor. The smith called the girl in to help, and I decided she must be his daughter and being trained to inherit the shop. Lucky girl.

I watched Alistair looking embarrassed as the smith's daughter measured every inch of his body (requiring a step-stool to reach some areas) until the eighth bell told me time was passing and I didn't want to miss Figor. I gestured for Morrigan and Rocky to come along and told Alistair I would come back later.

"But I don't like you wandering around alone, what if-" he started to protest, but I shook my head.

"I'll be less conspicuous without you," I explained. "Dogs get a lot of attention, sure, but people will assume I'm delivering them to some noble house and ignore me. If you're with me, they'll know we're outsiders."

"I don't like it."

"I'll be fine, I'm hardly defenseless and anyway I have Morrigan and Rocky." I pushed open the door and Morrigan trotted out as though relieved to get out of the hot workshop. Rocky barked and wagged his stub tail as though to reassure Alistair, then followed.

"Males, huh? So overprotective," I said to Morrigan. She huffed and flicked her ears. Rocky gave me a reproachful look.

The Commons was quieting down a little, but still abustle with late business. Truthfully, the Commons was never completely empty. When the gaslights were turned down for the "night," that just meant the less savory shoppers emerged to do their buying and selling. Figor's Imports had closed its door and taken down its"OPEN" sign, but light shone through the cracks around the door and I could hear voices inside.

"- your payments," I heard someone say, the voice familiar in its audible swagger. Roggar, Carta muscle with a big mouth.

"But Jarvia said she would forgive last month's protection payment in exchange for the wine-"

"That was last month," Roggar interrupted him. "Now you owe another payment. You don't want to fall behind on your protection. You've got an awfully nice shop here. Full of... breakable things."

"Not my shop!" Roggar's victim gasped in terror. "Look, I – I'll give you everything that's in the register now, and..."

"What do you think?" I asked Morrigan. "Shall we crash this party? Figor might be a little more free with the information if we've chased that arsehole off for him, and it sounds like the Carta might have been involved."

She grinned, revealing her bright white fangs. I took that as a yes, and pushed open the door.

"Roggar, come on, leave the poor man alone," I said in my most reasonable way. "If you suck him dry now, you'll put him out of business and he won't have any more money for you later. That's just bad management – _bloody hell_!"

Roggar was not alone, of course. I'd expected one other thug, since Bherat had normally sent his men out in pairs: One who did the talking, and one who stood around looking dangerous. But it would seem that Jarvia had made more changes than just ramping up the protection racket, and Roggar had three men with him, including – oh Stone – including Greghan, whose brother I'd killed in my escape from Bherat's prison, and whose daggers were already out and aimed at my face.

"You got sodding nerve to come back to the city, slut. Are those dogs screwing you, too, or just the human? Not much difference, though, is there," Greghan snarled. "Your puppies won't keep you safe. You can all three die like dogs."

"Greg, what in sod-all," Roggar shouted in surprise as Greghan lunged at me, blades first. Rocky reacted instantly, hurling himself past me at my attacker and knocking me sideways into a display of wooden carvings.

The room exploded with noise – crashing as the display shelves toppled over; cursing from the other dwarves; a soft, wet sound as Greg's knife sank into Rocky's shoulder; a crunch and a shriek of pain as Rocky's jaws closed over Geg's upper arm. Dog and man rolled across the floor and smashed into the checkout counter, bringing a small rack of cards down on top of them.

Roggar and his men, whom I didn't know, recovered from their surprise and drew their own weapons. Roggar fancied himself a badass and carried a greatsword, but the other two thugs kept to the traditional thieves' daggers.

Morrigan howled, the primal sound chilling the blood in our veins, and leaped effortlessly across the entire shop to hit Roggar paws-first in the chest before he could even bring his sword up. I was peripherally aware of her savaging the Carta spokesman as I struggled to get to my feet and get clear of the wreckage, her style very different from Rocky's as she snapped and slashed with lightning speed.

The other two thugs looked from me to Morrigan to Rocky, and made a snap decision to ignore me and help their downed leader. They rushed at Morrigan's back and got the shock of a lifetime when the first blade nicked her flank – she yelped and jumped out of their reach, morphing mid-leap and landing two-footed on the far side of a stack of boxes. By this time I'd finally gotten my foot disentangled from a treacherous bucket and I used the moment of stunned disbelief to hamstring the closest thug before he could chase after her. He yelled and toppled sideways onto hands and knees, and began to crawl for the exit as fast as he could. His co-worker hesitated, glancing back at him, and Morrigan curled her lips in a very wolf-like expression as she held out her hands and blasted a column of ice that caught them both and froze them solid.

Roggar groaned and rolled slowly onto his side. His arms were a tattered ruin from where he'd tried to protect himself from Morrigan's snapping fangs, and from the amount of blood already on the floor I didn't think he had much time left before he bled out. Rocky shook himself free of the last of the wreckage, leaving a still figure splayed out on the floor under the counter; I stifled a cry of distress and ran to press my hand over the gaping wound in his furry shoulder.

"P-please don't kill me!" whimpered Figor from the farthest corner.

Morrigan looked up from examining the shallow cut on her leg and snarled at the cowering shopkeeper, who wisely shut up. Then she brusquely pushed me away from Rocky and laid her palm over the stab wound, murmuring softly. Rocky panted and wagged in a pleasant sort of way like a dog satisfied with a job well done.

The frozen men thawed all at once and the wounded one sank limply to floor. The other coughed and fell to his knees, shivering uncontrollably. Now that I wasn't distracted by the battle, I was furious; I rose and grabbed a fistful of his greasy black hair, forcing him to look up at me.

"What's Jarvia's deal?" I demanded.

"I don't know what you're talking ab-"

I gave his head a shake, causing his eyes to water with pain. "I'm talking about that stupid, half-assed assassination attempt. That was sodding _amateur hour_. Who thought that up? I thought Jarvia was smart! Was it Harrowmont's idea?"

"I – I don't – Screw you!"

Morrigan stood up, the last of the blood on her hand evaporating in a blueish shimmer, and said coldly, "Allow me." I raised an eyebrow at her and stepped back, and she drew a complicated design in the air, a symbol fraught with menace. When she released it, shadows seemed to spring up from the ground and close in upon the trembling Carta thug. His eyes widened and his body stiffened in abject fear.

"Please," he begged, "in the name of the Paragons, please, make it go away!"

"Talk," I spat.

Morrigan waved a hand, and the shadows melted away. The man sobbed in relief and fell to the ground. At my impressed look, she shrugged and admitted, "My Horror works better when the opponent is already weakened. If he is unconscious..." She made a very descriptive gesture like a man's head exploding.

Her victim shuddered at that and hurried to tell us what he knew. "It wasn't Harrowmont, he don't know anything about it," he moaned.

"Then was Jarvia acting on her own?" I frowned. "Why would she do that? I thought the Carta favored Bhelen because he's such a gluttonous man-whore."

"Not anymore." He giggled, and I wondered if Morrigan's spell really had knocked him off his rocker. "Jarvia favors Leske now. When he said, 'We should poison Bhelen,' she said _oooh Leske, you're so clever and sexy, ooooh..._"

He dissolved into gales of laughter, and my heart sank down through the floor until I felt as cold as the Stone under the mountain.


	57. House Harrowmont

I stared at the Carta thug as he howled with mirth in reaction to Morrigan's spell, then turned and gestured sharply for Morrigan and Rocky to follow. "Let's get out of here."

"But... my shop!" Figor cried in dismay, looking over the smashed shelves and scattered merchandise.

I glanced at them, too; it still seemed to me like he'd gotten the better of the deal. Most of the merchandise would be fine once he'd dusted it off, and he himself was uninjured. "Bill House Aeducan for any irretrievable damages," I told him, and let the door swing shut behind us.

Morrigan shimmered back into her wolf, her fur now clean of any blood, and padded along at my right as I headed for the elevator. On the way back to the Steel Quarter, I said to her, "I don't know that we really need to tell Alistair too much detail about the fight, do you? I'd rather not deal with him fussing, and... The whole Carta thing is sort of a, a sensitive subject, if you know what I mean."

She flicked her ears in acknowledgment and seemed almost to smile; maybe she was pleased at being involved in something that Alistair didn't know about.

The man in question was sitting on a bench in Kamgar's shop, watching with idle curiosity as the master smith supervised a small army of apprentices in cutting bits of metal and leather. He must have called them in to get the job done faster, I thought, much more impressed with the whole operation now that the workshop was full and busy.

Alistair stood up when we entered, his face lighting with a smile that was just for me. I went to him for a hug and hid my face against his chest when I felt my lip tremble. I might have held on a little too long, because he asked, "Is everything okay? What did you guys find out?"

"The Carta did it," I said, not looking up. "We ambushed some thugs trying to shake down Figor and got the truth out of them."

"It wasn't Harrowmont?"

"The thugs didn't think so. They thought the Carta was acting on its own. They didn't say why. It's weird because Bherat had favored Bhelen; he used to sell Bhelen a lot of luxury goods, including Rica." Alistair winced at the phrasing and I let him go, stepping back. "Shall we go back? The Carta can wait until tomorrow, I think."

"What are you going to do about them?" he asked as we walked.

"I don't know!" I snapped. "What am I supposed to do, walk down there and say, _hey guys, that wasn't cool, stop poisoning my family_? Did you forget what happened last time I went against the Carta? I got thrown in a sodding _dungeon."_

We were walking the short distance from the Diamond Quarter elevator station to the palace when a ginger-blond man straightened from where he'd been leaning against a wall and apparently waiting for us. He strode quickly toward me, his armor clinking and his expression purposeful.

"Warden Latitia," he said as he came to a stop, blocking our path. Alistair stiffened beside me, his hand drifting toward his sword, and Rocky growled. The warrior was not intimidated. At first I thought the man stupid for accosting us, but then I saw the pack of private soldiers bearing House Harrowmont insignias lurking in the nearest alley.

"That's me," I said warily.

The man smiled coolly. "I am Dulin Forender, Lord Harrowmont's Second. My lord believes you are not fully informed as to the situation, and would like to discuss matters with you at his estate. Will you accompany me?"

"Like hell I will." I looked past him, trying to judge whether we were close enough to bolt for the palace.

"My lord thought you might be suspicious. I offer myself as your hostage," Dulin said quickly. He unbuckled his baldric and threw it aside, followed by his helmet and breastplate, and turned around, holding his hands behind his back, wrists crossed.

I wavered for a moment. I had no reason to listen to Harrowmont, none whatsoever. But I would have to be really, really dense not to realize the woman I'd met in the Deep Roads right before Duncan recruited me had been Bhelen's sister. She'd never given her House name, but noble women weren't exactly being exiled every day. She'd sworn she was innocent.

Bhelen _was_ a kinslayer, and an excellent liar. And he had my sister in thrall.

"Fine," I growled. I grabbed Dulin's collar in one hand and pressed the tip of a dagger to his neck with the other. "Lead on. We'll follow."

"What? But – Latitia, your sister," Alistair stammered in confusion.

"I just want to hear what he has to say," I told him, and, reluctantly, he followed us into Harrowmont's home. Morrigan hung back by the entrance, keeping an eye on the guards, and nobody cared because she looked like a dog. Stone bless her conniving little soul, I thought.

The estate itself was traditional to the point of caricature. It had been built around a quartz vein, its central room a sort of shrine to the light that refracted down from the surface. There were no modern dwarven drawings, only geodes, and no signs of the surface comforts that had found their way into so many dwarven households.

Harrowmont himself stood in his study, gazing distantly into his fireplace. He ignored us for several seconds after we entered – a deliberate power play, I was sure, since we'd made plenty of noise entering. Compared with Bhelen's warmth, he wasn't doing much to endear himself to us.

Finally, he turned around and looked us over. "I see you've taken my Second hostage. I understand your fear, but I assure you it isn't necessary. My... contacts among the palace staff informed me Bhelen had entertained Gray Wardens as guests, and that one was the famous casteless Warden who disgraced the proving, and whose sister was a noble hunter. Your sister, Rica."

I felt my cheeks flush. "Is that a threat to my family? Because I swear by the Ancestors I will kill you and leave your body for the deepstalkers if it is."

He shook his head. "No, nothing of the sort. I was merely explaining how we came to meet. I heard of you, and sent for you. And I understand why you have thrown your allegiance behind Bhelen. Nevertheless, I believe you and your sister are being deceived and I wish to tell you the truth."

"I know Bhelen killed his brother," I told him.

Alistair drew in his breath and stared at me in shock. Harrowmont blinked, then said with a frown, "Then I assume you support him merely for your sister's sake? I promise you, no harm shall come to her or her son by my hand. All noble children are a blessing to the dwarves and I will not harm her, you have my oath on it."

When I hesitated, Harrowmont pressed his advantage.

"Bhelen is unfit for the throne," he said, taking a step forward. "He was the youngest son, untrained and untrusted, even by his own father. The King himself asked me to ensure that Bhelen never assumes the throne. Even King Endrin could see what a power-hungry tyrant he would become. I do not ask you to change allegiances now. If you care at all for your people, I ask you only to consider my words."

_All noble children are a blessing to dwarves._ His words echoed in my head along with my growing rage. My hand shook on the hilt of my dagger. "What about casteless children, you arrogant son of a nug! Are we a blessing, too? Or are we a plague to be wiped out, like the orthodox deshyrs say? If you cared about your people, you'd realize _your people_ includes all the dwarves, even the surfacers. If my sister had borne a daughter, you'd throw her back into the dust, wouldn't you?"

"So would House Aeducan," Harrowmont said calmly. "Our laws stand as passed down through the generations. Make no mistake, Bhelen would cast your sister aside as quickly as any other noble. He is hardly the Paragon of compassion."

"I know." I dropped Dulin's collar and turned away, disgust filling my throat. Alistair started to follow me, but Harrowmont called him back.

"Senior Warden Alistair," he said formally. "Your companion is blinded by emotion. Bhelen is selfish and mad with lust – for power and for pleasure. No Harrowmont has ever sat the Throne, and I have never desired it for myself, but I do this now out of love for my people. Do not support our destruction. Consider what I've said."

"No thanks," Alistair said after only a moment's hesitation, during which my heart only just started to sink. He caught up to me and together we slammed the door on Harrowmont's house.

He stayed quiet, his long legs keeping up easily with my furious stride until we were back in the Warden quarters. There, Morrigan trotted into her own room and Rocky flopped on my bed; I made for the bathrooms with the intention of checking on Wynne and Leliana, but he caught my arm. "Is that true?" he asked intently. "Did he murder his own brother? How can we support a man like that? I thought family was important to you!"

"It is." I pulled my arm out of his grip and sat on the edge of a sofa. "Which is why we can't trust Harrowmont."

He sat down beside me. "You would abandon your entire city to a kinslayer?"

I rounded on him, my eyes flashing. "First of all, _yes_, I would, if it meant my entire family would be safe and happy. But, Alistair," I cut him off as he started to protest, "there's more to it than that. As a leader, Harrowmont is a joke. Bherat used to laugh about him as an ineffective old stick."

"And Bhelen's better?"

"Yeah, I think he is. Alistair, you don't understand this yet, but you will. We're going out into the Deep Roads soon, and... and before then, we've somehow got to deal with the Carta. By the time all this is done, you'll see the rot in the soul of the dwarven kingdom. You'll see why I want to take a chance on a man like Bhelen."

He looked at me for a moment, then nodded. "Okay. I trust you. I'm sorry, I shouldn't question you about things I don't understand."

I bit my lip, feeling exhausted in every possible way. I gave a sigh and slumped against him. "I wish I could explain. I wish I wasn't making these decisions alone."

"Oh, you're not," he said quickly. He shifted a little so he could put an arm around me. "I'm making decisions, too. I'm deciding to agree with you 100% of the time."

"You are not! You whine and argue," I mumbled.

"Do not."

"Do too."

He chuckled. I sighed again and pulled away. "I'm going to see how the others are doing."

"I'm going to take a _bath_," he said happily. "There's a bath right here in this room, did you notice? It's behind that curtain." He pointed to a curtained alcove.

"Didn't you just bathe?"

"Yes, but it's so _nice_." He sighed and stretched luxuriously in an excellent imitation of Zevran's absurdly relaxed attitude.

I laughed at him and left, crossing the common room to the bathroom attached to Wynne's room. I knocked on the door. "Wynne? You okay?"

"I've been better, but I think the worst is passing."

"Can I do anything for you?"

She paused, then called through the door, "You could bring me my book. It's in my pack, in the outer pocket. And a pillow to lean on."

I collected the items, raising an eyebrow at her choice of reading material, and opened the door to hand it over. "Nice abs on the guy on the cover."

She gave me a wan smile. "You caught me. Trashy romance is my vice." She took the pillow and the book, and I left her in privacy and went to visit Leliana.

"How's it going?" I called. "Need anything?"

"Maybe some company?"

I opened the door and went inside, shutting it behind me. She gave me a brave smile almost identical to Wynne's as I plopped down on the floor beside her, and she asked, "What did you do while you were out? Did you discover anything exciting? I could use a distraction."

"Well, Harrowmont tried to seduce us," I said.

She smiled mischievously. "Did he now? I'm sorry I missed it."

"Yeah, he took off his tunic and twirled it around his head while shakin' his moneymaker," I snorted. "No, actually he just badmouthed Bhelen and made some lame promises. I wasn't convinced."

She nodded. "What about the poison? Did he confess?"

"No." I swallowed and debated how much to say, but it seemed cruel to hide information about a poisoner from his victim. "The Carta did it. Apparently Leske is the boss's main squeeze, or right hand man, or something. Anyway. It was his idea, according to a thug we caught in the wine merchant's shop."

"Leske?" she frowned. "I remember the name, I never forget names, but..."

"He is – _was_ – an old and trusted friend."

"Oh." She looked away, and I thought she was giving me time to compose myself until she pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at her own eyes.

"What-" I started to ask, but she shook her head.

"It is of no moment. Suffice it to say, I understand how it feels to be betrayed by a trusted friend."

_She's never told me why she had to leave Orlais_, I remembered, and wondered if I should ask. But it didn't seem like a good time to dredge up a painful past, not while we were huddled around the latrine. Instead, I tried to shift the subject to something more pleasant. "Speaking of friends, how's it with you and Zev? Is he really as good as he says?"

She giggled and seemed relieved to talk about something else. "I don't know yet. Although he wasn't exaggerating about his massage skills."

"I thought that was a euphemism. Are you telling me you haven't, you know... tested that lode yet?"

"Oh no, it wouldn't do to rush these things," she said, smiling. "As long as he still feels he must win me, he will keep trying his hardest to do so. It is a game, and one I enjoy."

"Huh." I frowned. "Do you think I'm rushing things with Alistair? I mean, dwarves are... very straightforward about these kinds of things. I don't want to come off as easy."

She let go a silvery little laugh. "I would not worry. Alistair is not Zevran. He is more likely to be grateful for a little leadership. How is he doing? Not too nervous, is he, the poor innocent thing?"

I shrugged, feeling my cheeks flush. "Maybe. Probably. I don't – I mostly tell him to lie down and not move."

"That seems a dreadful waste, he is so handsome and athletic..."

She trailed off and her smile slowly faded, and I realized I was clenching my fists around the hilts of my daggers for comfort. I made myself relax and rubbed my palms briskly over my trousers to dry them.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"No, no, it's okay." I leaned my head back against the wall and looked up at the wrought iron brazier that lit the room. Branka's smokeless fuel burned a tiny bit redder than ordinary fire, but the lack of soot and the clean-smelling air was wonderful. "I'll get over it eventually."

"Time heals body and soul alike," she agreed.

"I don't know if time is what I need. It's awful easy to just sit and marinate until you're as bitter as your memories."

"You are too strong for that," Leliana said, "and a little outside help can go a long way to speed up the process. For me, it was the Maker who sheltered me in my time of trial and recovery. Perhaps I should ask Zevran to give Alistair a little adv – oh. Oh dear."

She suddenly lurched forward and bent over the latrine. I grabbed her hair and held it back from her face as she retched, then stood and fetched her a fresh cup of water.

"Ugh," she said with a grimace once she'd rinsed out her mouth. "Still, it could be worse, no?"

"Yeah, you could be dead." I grinned at her.

She smiled wanly and leaned back against the wall. "Thank you for your company, but you can go now if you like. I think I shall read from the Chant for a while. Perhaps it will calm my stomach as well as my heart."

"Good luck with that." I patted her shoulder and left her calmly reciting under her breath, and went back to the room I was sharing with Alistair.

"Are you still in the bath?" I demanded, seeing his bronzed head leaning comfortably against the rounded edge of the huge stone bathtub.

He shot a bright grin at me over his shoulder. "I may never leave. This thing is awesome. How are the others?"

"Puking, but they're keeping a good attitude about it." I watched him push little mounds of bubbles around for a few seconds. He'd obviously found some soap somewhere and made liberal use of it. He scooped a few handfuls of bubbles up and piled them on his knees, then poked his finger into the top to make a few holes like windows.

"Look, I made Redcliffe," he said, and my heart ached at how boyishly happy he looked.

"Very nice," I managed to say.

He glanced back at me again. "You want a turn? I can get out."

"No, stay." I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off my boots and socks. I'd intended to join him – he looked so relaxed, and I was so tired and frayed. But I paused and stood behind him, holding my shirt over my meager breasts in a sudden agony of doubt.

"W-what did you think of Rica?" I asked him, trying to sound nonchalant. Now that he knew what dwarf women were _supposed_ to look like, maybe he didn't want to tie himself down to one like me.

"She's sweet," he said. "You have the same smile." He splashed some water around, making wind-and-waves sound effects with his mouth. "Whoosh!"

"Isn't she hot?"

He thought about that for a second. "I like her hair," he said finally.

"That's it?" I didn't believe him.

"Look, Tisha, I'm trying to be tactful," he said, turning and hanging an elbow over the side of the tub. He paused for a second when he noticed my half-dressed state, then went on, blushing slightly. "If Teagan were here, he'd probably burst into flames at the sight of her, but honestly, she's not my type. I'm sorry, I hope you're not, um, offended?"

"Oh. N-no, it's fine." I fidgeted for another second, then dropped the rest of my clothes and jumped into the tub.

Water slopped over the sides and he squawked in surprise, shielding his face. "Hey, watch it with the splashes!"

"Big baby." I got comfortable curled up with my head on his chest, the water lapping at my chin. "I don't believe you at all, by the way. Nobody can resist Rica's tits."

He snorted with laughter and wrapped his arms around me. He felt wonderful, warm and slick from the water. I wanted to melt into him. "There are female Templars, you know. I had a woman as my trainer in the shield, Ser Eryhn. She was... like a lion. So powerful and graceful. She and the other women warriors make regular ladies look like soft, weak things. I guess I'm spoiled."

I thought about that. It made sense that, if he was used to tough women, he might actually prefer them. I was ashamed of how much better that made me feel. _I'm being pathetic_, I thought as I sank a little lower in the water, listening to his heart beat slow and strong. He leaned his cheek against my head and I felt his body stir as the train of his thoughts shifted, and smiled to myself.

"I'm so glad it was you up there with me on he Tower of Ishal, and not... some other warden," he said, then shook his head. "Ugh, that didn't come out right. I was trying to say-"

"No, I get it. I'm glad, too." I slipped my arms around his waist and snuggled closer.

"I love you," he whispered.

I wanted to answer him, I did, but the words caught as my throat constricted with pain and sorrow. _Dusters don't love_, I thought as Leske's grinning face flashed through my mind. Desperately, I reached up to pull his head down and kiss him, to hope he would understand anyway.

He pulled away, flushing. "Why do you do that?" he asked, sounding hurt. "You never – you never _say_ anything about how you feel. I tell you _everything_. I don't understand, does that mean you don't..."

"No, I..." I lowered my eyes, pressing my forehead against his chest as I felt my face crumple. "I don't know. I'm sorry. I just – please, not tonight, okay? Please."

"What's wrong?" He cradled my head, most of the hurt in his voice replaced with concern. "Are you worried about Rica? We could go visit her. Would that help?"

"It's Leske," I sobbed, shivering helplessly. "Leske ordered Bhelen poisoned. He could have killed Rica, he could have killed _you!_ I thought he _loved_ Rica. I thought he loved _me_."

"You called him brother," Alistair said quietly, shocked. "Maker's breath, Tisha. I'm so sorry. Maybe – maybe it was an accident, or a misunderstanding of some kind?"

I shook my head, unable to speak. Somehow, I knew it was true. The thug hadn't been lying, not about the Carta's involvement anyway, and even if Leske hadn't given the order, he certainly hadn't tried to stop it or warn my sister. And tomorrow I was going to have to hunt him down and demand an accounting...

Alistair held me as I cried until I went limp with exhaustion, then carried me to the bed, rubbed me dry with a thick towel and tucked me in. I was asleep before he'd blown out the lamps.

* * *

_Thanks to mille libri for taking time out of her vacation to be my beta hero, and, as always, my sincere thanks for spending your valuable time reading my story. I promise not to let it go to my head!_

_You might be interested in a short story detailing some of Latitia's adventures as a scavenger - sorry, Treasure Hunter - in the Deep Roads before Duncan swept her off to a life on the surface. You can find it in my profile. _


	58. A Terrible Plan

_A/N: Nug pancakes are real, I swear on my ancestors' beards! They're in the Codex, "In Praise of the Humble Nug."_

_In other news: There will be a delay before the next chapters of any of my stories. I've had a stressful winter and need to rebuild my chapter buffer before I go crazy! Thank you so much for your patience, and as always, thank you for reading. Special thanks to mille libri for her support, and for putting up with multiple radically different versions of this chapter and lots and lots of my whining._

* * *

The thing about being underground is, if nobody turns on the lights, it's dark. No sun comes up and smacks you in the face with its light whether you like it or not. That might seem like a no-brainer, but it meant that I slept for _ages_ because Alistair snuck out in the dark for breakfast and left the lights off. When I finally dragged my lazy carcass out of bed and wandered into the common room of our suite, rubbing my eyes and yawning, Alistair, Morrigan, Leliana and Wynne were sitting around the breakfast table and playing cards with coppers.

"Nice of you to drop in," Morrigan said cuttingly.

"She's just mad because I'm beating her at three-card rummy," Alistair said with a grin. "Wynne's already out."

I smiled at him and shuffled over to the table to look at his cards. He had a terrible hand, but Leliana was watching my face so I raised my eyebrows a little as though I were impressed by the cards, then turned away quickly like I'd only just realized I was giving him away.

"I fold," said Leliana. Morrigan grunted in disgust and tossed her cards on the table face-down.

"Victory!" Alistair cried, scooping up the coppers.

I pulled over another chair beside Alistair and flopped into it. "How are you feeling? Have we heard from Rica and Zev?"

"Rica stopped by to say they're okay, but Bhelen needs to get some paperwork done in his office," Wynne answered. "As for us, well, we decided to pass on breakfast but otherwise we're fine, right, Leliana?"

"Except for losing to _that_ hand of cards," Leliana pouted. "Latitia cheated."

"No, I didn't. That was Alistair's unexpected prowess at cards," I said. "What's for breakfast?"

"Well," Alistair said dubiously, "the server said it's nug pancakes but frankly I don't know how you can make a pancake out of a nug."

"Ooh," I exclaimed, shoving the lid off the serving bowl, grabbing a pancake and stuffing the entire thing into my mouth. "Mmmmmmff." I swallowed ecstatically. "Now that's breakfast done _right_. You just sort of mush up all the leftover bits until it's as smooth as batter and then fry it, you know, like a sausage patty."

That was the last straw for poor Leliana, who burst into tears. While we were comforting her, reassuring her that the cute little nug didn't suffer and promising to find her some porridge to eat instead, somebody knocked at the door.

"Wardens," the messenger on the other side said with a curt nod for me and a bow for Alistair. "Miss Rica bids me invite you to the emerald ambassadorial meeting chamber, where she is entertaining a guest."

"Oh, okay." I turned to address the rest of the room. "Do you lot want to come, or just hang out here and rest? I can come get you when Bhelen's ready to talk to us. We..." I faltered, realizing I still hadn't told Wynne about Leske and hadn't discussed possible plans with anyone yet and _really didn't want to_, but I was spared from having to say anything by the three women shaking their heads.

"You go on, we should rest while we can," Wynne said, still patting Leliana's hand as the redhead sniffled and tried to compose herself.

"I have no wish to sit and watch another soppy reunion. Call me when 'tis time to actually _do_ something." Morrigan stalked away to her room, looking like she was about to crawl out of her skin.

"All right, just us then." I took Alistair's arm and pulled him along as the messenger led us out to the front of the palace and into a semi-private conference room just inside the main entrance. Rocky trailed after us, using the opportunity to catalog the smells in the palace and generally get nose-slime on everything.

Rica was waiting for us, bouncing a little on her toes in excitement, and when she saw me she squealed with delight and ran forward to grab my hands and drag me into the room. "Oh, you won't believe who's here, Latitia," she babbled. "I asked Bhelen if he could come in for a little while for a special visit, since you're here, and he said _yes,_ this is so perfect! Maybe later he'll let me bring little Endrin out, too!"

"Look at you ladies!" cried a familiar voice. "A Gray Warden and the Prince's concubine – who's the luckiest dusters now, eh, _salrokas_?"

I couldn't breathe. Clearly, I was still asleep and dreaming. Leske... Leske was stretched out in a chair and grinning at me. Not quite the same Leske as before – this man's grin had a feral edge, his eyes harder than I remembered, a few new scars crossing his arms.

He unwound himself from the chair and approached, and he moved like a stalking cat. I flinched away from him and bumped into Rica. Why couldn't anyone see something was horribly wrong? Then he was hugging me, warm and friendly as ever, while I stood like a stunned rabbit, my limbs frozen in shock.

"What's the matter, can't speak for the joy of seeing your old pal Leske?" he teased. Then his eyes flicked up, a long way up, to Alistair's flatly hostile face. "Who's your big friend?" he asked warily, pulling away.

"Uh," I said.

"Gray Warden Alistair," he introduced himself when it became clear that I had not yet regained the power of speech. He took a step forward and laid a hand on my shoulder, crossing the other over his chest in a coldly formal greeting. Rocky heard the tension and trotted over, ears pricked forward.

"Gherlin's _balls_ that's a big dog," Leske gasped and scrambled backward until he hit the conference room table, losing his cool for the first time. He'd been afraid of dogs ever since a bull terrier almost bit his face off during a failed burglary.

"What are you doing here?" I snapped suddenly. "How dare you come here and – and pretend to be our friend, you traitorous bastard!"

"Latitia!" Rica cried, her hand going to her mouth.

"What are you talking about?" Leske said in apparent bewilderment, still staring at Rocky.

"One of Roggar's goons told me you were behind the attempt to poison Bhelen," I told Leske, uncertainty starting to creep into my voice.

"That was you? Sod it, Tisha, you didn't have to kill them," he said reproachfully. "I don't know what Ambhek told you, but he staggered back into Dust Town babbling about fluffy pink brontos so I wouldn't put too much faith in him. What in sod-all did you do to the poor duster?"

"But I..." I thought back to last night. "I heard Roggar say the Carta did poison the wine, though. He didn't know I was listening, he had no reason to lie."

Leske shrugged, starting to relax since Rocky hadn't immediately gone for the jugular. "I don't know what the Carta's doing. I'm out. You saw how pissed the others were that we killed Bherat, imagine how mad Jarvia was! She won't let me anywhere near the Carta no more."

"Oh, you poor thing," Rica said. "Do you need money?"

"Nah, I'll be fine." Leske grinned at her and sat back down on the bench. "I'm just happy to see you... two again. Hey, when do I get to meet your baby daddy? I need to make sure he's good enough for ya."

Rica sat beside him and started babbling excitedly about her baby; I could tell by the way Leske's eyes followed every gesture and flicker of expression that his feelings for Rica hadn't dimmed in the slightest. Alistair gave me a questioning look, but I didn't know what to tell him.

I'd been so sure Leske betrayed us, but now I felt like I was the traitor for being so quick to believe some random thug over my oldest friend. Leske started telling Rica a story about picking a pocket in the Commons only to find a hilariously obscene statuette of a – well, it made her giggle and blush, whatever it was, and eventually I sat down beside them because the scene was so achingly familiar I couldn't bear to just watch from the outside. Alistair touched my hand and I took his in a white-knuckled grip; for once, neither of us knew what to say.

"No, but seriously, Rica," Leske said after trading a few more humorous anecdotes and also hearing all about baby Endrin's sleeping habits, "I really would like to meet Bhelen, even if only for a moment. I can hang around here all day if I have to wait for him, it's not like I got a busy schedule."

"Oh, I really shouldn't ask..." Rica bit her lip, torn between desire to show off her man and worry about offending Bhelen by asking him to indulge her once more.

Leske turned to me with a fresh grin. "You could ask him. Introduce your new patron to your old buddy? Yeah? Come on, when will I get another chance to meet the man who might be King of Orzammar? I want to see if nobles really do shit gold and sweat diamonds."

I wanted to trust him. I really did. I wanted us to be a family again, to give him the gifts that still lay in their wrapping at the bottom of my pack, to rescue him from the dust. I wanted to trust him so badly that I felt my mouth open to say yes without even meaning to, when a sound from across the foyer interrupted me.

The big doors to the throne room opened and Bhelen strode out, carrying a sheaf of papers. The conference room was doorless and Rica's shining red hair caught his eye all the way across the wide foyer; his tired face creased in a smile and he changed course towards her. Rica jumped away from Leske, flushing slightly though she hadn't been indecently close to him, and ran to kiss Bhelen's cheek with exuberance that made him beam.

Leske's face twisted with some powerful emotion I couldn't name, and I felt a stab of sympathy for him; it couldn't be easy, seeing Rica with another man, even though it was hardly the first time. I didn't know why he tortured himself by asking to see Bhelen. Maybe he was trying to finally move on from her, and meeting Bhelen would help with that, I thought.

So, when Bhelen came over to greet me and Alistair, I bowed politely and said, "My lord, this is my oldest friend, Leske."

"Yes, I've heard so much about you," Bhelen said coolly, looking the other man up and down.

"Good things, I hope," Leske said with a grin that was all teeth. "I'm so glad you let me visit Rica. I've wanted to show you how grateful I am that you took her away from Dust Town."

Bhelen glanced at Rica, smiling. "Well, a beautiful jewel deserves a beautiful setting, don't you think – ah!"

Leske had moved so fast, I only knew what had happened when I saw him pull the bloody knife out of Bhelen's ribs. Rica shrieked. Rocky whined, confused – he had thought Leske was a friend and didn't know what to do. Leske bolted for the door as Bhelen crumpled and Alistair lunged to catch the Prince before he fell. A sudden flicker in the shadows by the door and Zevran struck like a snake, cutting Leske down before I could scream at him not to hurt my friend.

"Get Wynne, for Andraste's sake _run_," Alistair was shouting at me, then swore and ran to get her himself because I was moving toward the bloodied body on the floor at Zevran's feet.

"I am so very sorry," Zevran said, wiping his dagger clean. "Had I been closer, perhaps I could have stopped him. I am no good at the _prevention_ of assassination, it would seem. Ah! He is a tough one, this," he added when Leske coughed and tried to crawl away. "Shall I finish him off for you?"

I grabbed Leske's leather vest and threw him onto his back, where he groaned, screwing his eyes up in pain. "Why, Leske? Why would you lie to us? Why would you try to hurt Rica?" I demanded as tears ran down my cheeks and fell onto his face.

"I never hurt Rica," he snarled, "I wanted that arrogant bastard _dead_ for taking her. He's not good enough, not nearly sodding good enough for her."

"And you are?" I demanded. "You stupid arse, she's never loved you and she never will. What did you think would happen? She would run into your arms to cry on your shoulder?"

"I don't care if she never loves me," he said in a voice full of anguish and despair. "I just – you don't know the hell you put me through! After you and Rica left, I couldn't pay the rent by myself, I lived on the streets, everyone wanted to kill me for killing Bherat, I – I was so _alone_. Then Jarvia said, if I did whatever she told me to, she'd help me kill the man who took Rica away. I've been trying for weeks. I thought, maybe then she would come home again."

"_That was a terrible plan!_" I cried.

He smiled a little. "Yeah, well, you always were the one with the good plans, _salroka_."

"You can come with me," I said desperately. "My friends can heal you, and you can come with me and fight darkspawn, everything's gonna be okay – Leske, you nug's arsehole, if you die I swear I'll kill you myself-"

"Don't fuss yourself, duster." He closed his eyes. "Always knew I'd die in my own blood. It's okay."

The world felt very still and silent, despite the guards belatedly running around and Wynne chanting with Morrigan and Rica having hysterics and Zev making some comment about chatty dead men, and after a moment I whispered, "Leske?"

No answer.

"Leske?" I shook his shoulder urgently. "Leske!"

"He's gone, _carina_," Zev murmured, laying a restraining hand on my arm. "I know death when I see it."

I stared at the unmoving face for a moment before anger slipped its fingers gently into the gaping hole in my heart. Then I banged my fist against the stone floor and _screamed_.

When I ran out of breath I jumped to my feet and turned to see everyone staring at me except Wynne, who was still bent over Bhelen's chest. I took a few breaths, trembling with rage, until I could speak.

"Will Bhelen recover?" I asked tersely.

"Yes," Wynne answered. "We came in time."

"Good. Alistair, Rocky, Zevran, Morrigan," I pointed at each of them, leaving out Leliana who was comforting Rica, "get your weapons and armor."

"Where are we going?" Alistair asked nervously.

"We're going to kill Jarvia."


	59. The End of the Carta

Fully armed and armored, my friends followed me across the palace's marble tiles towards the door. Bhelen and the others weren't in the front hall anymore, so he must have been moved to his rooms. The only sign of the morning's violence was a maid on her knees beside a bucket of soapy water, scrubbing industriously at the bloodstains on the floor.

We stopped to pick up Alistair from the smith's, and he came out shining with enthusiasm. "Not too shabby, eh?" he said, admiring himself in his new leafmail. It rustled softly instead of rattling, because each steel leaf was covered with felt in shades of dark gray that blended with the stone walls.

"You look great. Okay, so here's how it's going to go," I explained tersely as we walked. "When we burst into the hideout, I want everyone to be as scary as possible. I want them to think the wrath of the Old Gods is upon them. Morrigan, a light show would be helpful. Anyone who's not getting paid well enough to die will hopefully run away."

"Shock and awe, hmm? I approve," Zevran said with a toothy grin. "Every body that runs away is a body that won't be spilling blood all over my good boots."

"Yeah, basically. A lot of them will be afraid of Rocky, too, especially since he's as tall as a dwarf and twice as long." I took a deep breath and went on. "Some are thugs, others are sneaky bastards who fight like me and Zev. When it gets down to fighting, we need to stay in corridors and tight spaces so they can't get around behind us, everyone here has better reach so it's flanking we need to worry about-"

"Which end of the sword do I hold? I keep forgetting," teased Alistair.

"It's not funny!" I slapped his arm, and to my surprise found myself close to tears. "When we sparred, some of those guys wiped the floor with my face! And... a lot of them are people I know. People I _like_. I don't want to _kill_ them, they're just dusters who don't have any other career options."

He nodded, his smile fading. "I can try to hold back-"

Zevran looked alarmed, and I shook my head vehemently. "No. Better to brutally slaughter a few so the others run away. If they think you're a pussy, they'll jump you like a pack of deepstalkers."

I stopped at the last stall before the Dust Town entrance and bought a handful of nug kabob. I handed one to Alistair, munching on another as I led us down the stairs. Once out, Dust Town looked the same as always (crowded, dusty, and full of people with nothing better to do than stare at passersby), and I held out hope that Jarvia and the Carta didn't know about Leske's failed attempt. I jogged across the square to Nadezda's corner, where she still sat, looking markedly less pale.

She grinned as we approached, her brand almost disappearing into smile lines and a girlish dimple. "Ahoy, duster. The tea worked a trick. I almost feel like dwarva again."

"Great!" I crouched in front of her and handed her the rest of the kabobs. Her eyes widened and she stuffed a big chunk of meat into her mouth. "So," I said while she chewed, "I found Rica. She had Bhelen's baby – that's Prince Bhelen Aeducan, I mean."

Nadezda nodded, swallowing. "I know. I tried to tell you but you done a bolt before I could get the words out. Er... What do I owe you for the grub?"

"I need to visit the Carta. I'm sure they've changed the doors around since I left, or I'd just go on in." I hesitated, considering, but there were always too many people around to be sure who might be listening, so I said, "I'm not gonna cause trouble. I want to talk to her about paying protection so she keeps her goons away from my sister."

She shrugged. "Yeah, sure. Tuesday's door is down that alley," she pointed with a skewer, "but you'll need a token. Better mug some poor sod for it, if you just bang on the door they won't let you in."

"Thanks again, Nadezda. I won't forget it."

"Hey, duster," she said as I stood to go, and I looked back at her. She gave me a wicked grin. "Give Jarvia my best."

I grinned back, a little sheepish at being so transparent. "Will do. You might want to make yourself scarce."

The alley Nadezda had indicated bent twice, curving around what had once been a cupola of the ancient palace's dining wing, casting the alley's end into deep shadow. As we approached, we heard the click of a latch, followed by a startled gasp. Rocky bounded forward and disappeared into the shadows, and after a yelp and a momentary scuffle, we saw a small, shabby, very unhappy street urchin pinned to the ground under one of Rocky's massive forepaws.

He cringed and brought his hands up over his head, whimpering, "Get the buffer off me! For the love of the Stone, it's droolin' down my neck!"

"Gimme the door token," I ordered, bending down and holding out my hand. When he hesitated, Rocky growled; shaking with haste, the boy groped blindly in his pockets and produced a finger-bone token. I took it and gestured for Rocky to let the poor kid go, and he scurried away and disappeared.

I leaned forward and examined the door. The most obvious place for the token was right at eye height and, not coincidentally, trapped with a blade designed to lop the fingers off of anyone dumb enough to shove their stolen token in without checking first. Down near the ground and half-hidden by a broken carving was another slot, and I slid the token in after a moment of fiddling to get it the right way up. Inside the door, a lock clicked open.

I straightened and looked back at the others, whispering, "Ready to burst in like the angry fist of Toth?"

"Let's go," Alistair said, drawing his sword. Rocky whuffed excitedly and pushed forward to rear up on his hind legs with his paws on the door.

It swung open and he and Alistair stormed in, Morrigan following close behind and radiating electricity that crackled along the walls and arced from the tip of Alistair's sword. Zevran and I ran in after her just in time to see one guards drop his mug to shatter on the floor as the other swore and stood up so fast he knocked over their card table.

"Run," commanded Alistair, his electrified swordblade leaving bright trails in the air as he stepped aside. "We just want Jarvia. Run and live."

The man with the mug took one look at the spectacle and took the opening offered him, bolting out the door we'd just come through, but the other ran deeper into the den to rally defense. "Rocky!" I shouted, and the dog was on him in two long leaps. The guard hit the floor with a crunch and lay still, blood spreading across the stone from beneath his face.

I ran after him and shooed my dog away from the body to grab a fistful of hair, pulling the head back to look at his face. "I'm sorry, Yorik," I murmured, then raised my voice enough for Alistair to hear. "I'll hold the head, you chop it off, all right? Hurry, now."

He gave me a dismayed look, but obeyed, hacking through the bone of Yorik's neck with care to avoid chipping his sword on the stone floor.

"Come on," I said and strode forward with my dog swaggering at my side, Yorik's head hanging by its hair. Morrigan had let her lightning go out, but I could smell the ozone of her readiness to call it again.

As I'd expected, a door a short distance down the tunnel opened before we reached it and an armed thug staggered out, still tightening the belt on his armor. Rocky lunged at him snarling, and the thug threw himself back to get away, hitting the doorframe with his shoulders; behind him, the barracks-room was full of bruisers pulling their gear on.

I heaved Yorik's head as far into the barracks-room as I could – I had no idea heads were so sodding heavy – and bellowed "GET THE HELL OUT, you sods, or it'll be the worse for you!" Morrigan obligingly waved a hand at the head as it rolled into the center of the stunned crowd, and the head exploded, showering them in bits of bone and brain. Most of the men reconsidered their career choices at that point, and the others met their deaths at the ends of our blades.

The Carta hideout was full of bolt-holes and secret exits, and many of its members elected to use them as Morrigan especially got more and more into the charade, summoning the most terrifying elemental spectaculars I'd ever seen and even enchanting Rocky's hide to ripple with frost and inspire cold dread in all who saw him. We raced through the twisting corridors, struggling to keep ahead of the rising tide of resistance and stopping only to slaughter those few who stood in our way, until I heard a familiar woman's voice calling to her rogues.

I smiled humorlessly when I realized she was in the same room where I'd fought Bherat. She'd kept his stupid throne room, the pretentious bitch. Wonder if she scrubbed out the bloodstains, or if she kept them as a memento? I shook myself, checked the door for obvious traps and, finding none, stepped aside to let Alistair throw it open.

Jarvia grinned at us from the center of the room, flanked by men I recognized as Carta elite. Several of the lamps and braziers had been extinguished and I guessed the shadows hid more muscle, archers or assassins. Zev could probably handle those. I hoped.

Jarvia's grin flickered when I grabbed Alistair's arm, holding him back from entering the room. "Come out and play, _Jarvia_," I taunted. "As if I would go in there – I've seen dead spiders set better traps than you. And Bherat always said you were smart, too. Or at least, he did before I gutted him."

"Mad because Leske killed your whore sister's baby daddy?" Jarvia sneered, fingering her bowstring.

"Leske's dead," I snarled, then added, "you stupid slag," when I remembered _I_ was supposed to be taunting _her_.

Her face went blank for an instant before it slipped back into her sneer of contempt. Maybe she really had liked Leske. Too late now. "It wasn't enough for you to abandon your friends, you had to _kill_ them, too? You won't be happy until you destroy Dust Town, will you?"

"_You're_ destroying Dust Town," I snapped, stung. "You're getting greedy and calling too much attention. You'll get the whole army down here if you don't stop. Bhelen says-"

"Don't engage with her," Zevran hissed in my ear.

Jarvia laughed, her lip curled in disgust. "You really think Bhelen is the savior of the brands? It's a campaign platform, a sodding _insult_. All he'll do is screw us over like everyone else – like he does your sister. You're an idiot for believing him, cloudhead."

"You take that back!"

She grinned again. "What, 'cloudhead?' Sorry, do you prefer sun-touched _shikzet_?"

Jarvia gestured towards us with a jerk of her head and crossbow bolts zipped from the shadows even as Alistair swung his shield in front of my face, his elbow hitting me in the shoulder when the force of the bolts striking his shield staggered him back a step. A stray bolt embedded itself into the thick armor over my hip, the heavy leather blunting its tip – not a serious wound – and behind me Zevran swore and fell back, his hand going to his shoulder and coming away dark with blood.

"Before they reload," Alistair shouted to us. "Now, let's go!"

Rocky bayed joyously and barreled forward, and Jarvia backed quickly into a squared-off section of floor, loosing an arrow that missed the speeding dog. The small casks set around its edges were a dead giveaway but I had no time to scream at Rocky to stop before he sprang at Jarvia. His leap took him over the tripwires and she ducked nimbly away from him, shouldering her bow and drawing her daggers, while Rocky's claws scored the stone tiles as he spun to face her again.

Morrigan bent over Zev and began her chant, and I cast an agonized look at my dog before I followed Alistair's tactical decision and closed on the nearest threat to our unarmored healer. He ran to the left and I to the right, following the clicking sounds of crossbow winches desperately being wound up again, and the archer materialized out of the darkness before me. He cast aside his half-drawn crossbow and reached for his dagger before I stabbed him up under the ribs and left him dying, turning on my heel to search for the next threat.

"_Brasca_, woman, I am fine!" Zevran was shaking Morrigan off and flicking his long blades into his hands, trying to get into the fight. The witch shrugged, let him go and coolly looked around the room, then spread her fingers, electricity arching across the room to the braziers and igniting the coals within.

The sudden blazing light dazzled all the subterranean eyes and revealed the assassin creeping up behind Alistair. My human comrade didn't mind the light at all and ran the assassin through before she could blink away her blindness.

The crossbowmen at the rear of the room, nearer Jarvia, finished reloading and shot at Morrigan. Even as the bolts left their bows, she shimmered with unearthly green light and reformed as her giant green spider. The bolts passed harmlessly above her carapace and she scuttled forward, jumped and twisted in midair to crawl along the ceiling and spit acid down onto one of the archers before leaping across to land on the other, needle-like legs piercing deep into his body as he cried out in terror.

Zevran and I were running to help Rocky; Jarvia twisted and dodged to keep the dog off her, shrieking, "Kill it! Waste the mangy beast!"

"Wait – let me get the traps," I called to Zev, fumbling in my pockets for my tools.

He flashed his brilliant grin at me. "No need," he cried merrily, and closed with a hammer-wielding thug who swung a ponderous blow at the elf's head. Zev ducked and caught the dwarf's arm, crouched and flipped him headfirst into the casks, which exploded, filling the air with smoke and embers. The blast was stronger than he expected and knocked us both off our feet, and through the smoke I heard Jarvia's grunt as she hit the ground and Rocky's vicious snarl.

Shaking my head, I struggled to stand, listening fearfully to the growls and wet sounds coming from the center of the cloud, and then the breeze from the ventilators cleared the air enough for me to see Jarvia stagger upright, her dagger glazed red, and back away from the furry body sprawled limply on the floor. She coughed and stumbled for the stairs at the rear of the room, blood streaming from her ruined face and long gashes across her chest and arms. I ran to Rocky, slipping on the wet floor, screaming for Morrigan to _do_ something.

"She's getting away," Alistair yelled and started to chase after Jarvia.

"Stay, you blind fool," Zevran snapped, pointing first to our dog and then to the door, through which streamed a half-dozen Carta brigands. Alistair paled and set himself between us and the reinforcements, crouching behind his shield, the tip of his sword low and ready.

Morrigan stayed spider long enough to twist her thorax forward and shoot a sticky mass of webbing at the nearest brigand, stopping him in his tracks, then dropped to the floor, landing on two legs with her hands already glowing. Rocky twitched his ears – he wasn't dead, but he was so _still_.

"Why isn't he moving?" I begged, running my hands over his flanks and looking for wounds. I only found one, but an assassin as good as Jarvia only needs one and my body went cold.

"His spine is cut," Morrigan said unnecessarily. "Do not touch – get away, girl. I am working! Make yourself useful and kill something!"

Alistair faced off with three rogues at once, deadlocked, edging sideways in response to their feints and twitching his own weapon back but unwilling to commit to a blow when so many knives were waiting for an opening. Zevran danced with a fourth, one I recognized as a highly skilled assassin, grinning and trading blows so quickly they blurred, blocking the dwarf's attempts to bypass him and strike at our vulnerable witch.

I had to trust my friends to do their jobs. I turned my back on my poor dog to dodge past Zevran's fight and slaughter the man still tearing himself free of Morrigan's web – I found my heart was low on mercy now, and it was better to eliminate him while he was still easy to kill.

"Fucking _bitch_," roared the fifth thug in outrage. He came at me hard, waving sword and shield, but enough time fighting beside Alistair had taught me the weaknesses of the style – when he circled to keep me on his shielded side, I lunged and caught hold of the shield's edge. He punched out to shake me off, and I fell back and yanked hard on the shield, pulling it out of position so far he flailed to keep his balance and in that instant I buried a dagger in his neck.

He fell to his knees in shock and I left him, whirling to flank the Carta who were focused on Alistair. A blade in the kidney let the closest know he was under attack, and his scream of pain brought the other two's heads around instinctively. Alistair struck instantly and stabbed the man I'd attacked in the gut – he was dead, even if he didn't know it. We circled the other two as they fought to regain their advantage but it was too late for them, and when Zevran shouted in triumph as their leader fell, that was the only sound for several moments except our ragged breathing.

Panting, I knelt beside Rocky and touched the furry shoulder. "Is-"

"Hush," Morrigan snapped. Her face was white with effort and covered in sweat, and I flinched away, afraid to distract her and ruin everything.

Alistair's gauntleted hand closed on my shoulder, and I looked up into his pained attempt at a reassuring smile. "I'll stay with him. You go after Jarvia, I don't want to have to do this again if she gets away."

I nodded and tore myself away, sidestepping another tripwire automatically in my rush to the stairs that led up into the darkness. I passed one landing, then another, and then a knife came out of the shadows under the stairs and sliced across my cheek. She must be badly hurt or she wouldn't have missed. Skidding to a halt, I squinted in the dark and saw Jarvia slumped against the wall, holding another throwing knife in limp fingers that looked too weak to lift it.

"Finish me," Jarvia panted, her voice a muddy gasp of pain. Her face looked like so much sausage meat; I was amazed she could speak at all. When I didn't move, she rasped, "What're you waiting for? You wanna gloat? Then gloat, and get it over with."

"Was it worth it?" I asked softly. "Was it worth all those people's deaths? You know it would have been worse if it hadn't been me, if Bhelen had sent the Aeducan army instead."

"Spare me the fake compassion," she sneered, then coughed and spat blood onto my boot. "Sodding Gray Warden, so high and mighty. Stop pretending you care. At least I took care of my own."

"Like you took care of Nadezda? Like you took care of Leske?"

She didn't say anything to that. Finally, she whispered, "Duster, I'm dying. Please, just finish it."

"Fine," I said after a long moment, and that was the end of the Carta. For now, at least.

Down below, Morrigan was issuing orders like an army general, commanding the assembly of a litter from various cloaks and staves and table legs. "What's going on?" I asked apprehensively. "Can't you fix him?"

She glared at me, clearly infuriated at her inability to do just that. "No. I have stabilized him. Now we must return him to Wynne for further care."

The trip to the palace was agonizingly slow, especially the stairs up from Dust Town, as we struggled to keep from jostling Rocky and Morrigan followed with a hand on his side, a constant flow of energy keeping him alive. We found Wynne at last in Bhelen's suite, talking to Leliana; she took one look at Rocky and ordered him brought to the Warden suite and lain on our bed.

"Yes, he'll be fine," she said to our anxious questions, her face lined with concern. "Morrigan, stay and watch. Latitia... was right. It is too dangerous for only one of us to know these things. Everyone else, shoo. I need to concentrate."

We were standing around in the Warden's common room, at loose ends, when Rica arrived and threw herself at me, crying, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."

"Wynne says he'll be okay," I said uncertainly, patting her on the back.

"No, I – I mean, I'm sorry for everything," she wept. "This is all my fault. If I had stayed home with you, you would never have been working for Bherat, you wouldn't have been in that Proving and we would all be together. Leske would be alive."

I stiffened, thinking about all the other people who would be alive now, too. All the people whose blood was now sullying Rica's dress.

"Bhelen's never going to forgive me," she sobbed miserably. "I'll never forgive _myself_."

"It's okay. It's all gonna be okay," I whispered, hugging her, but I felt like I was talking to myself. How could it be okay when things would never be the same again?

Then Alistair's warm hands fell on my shoulders and he said cheerfully, "Sure, but if you hadn't been in that Proving, I'd be fighting the Blight all by my lonesome and you know how _that_ would go. I'd get lost, people would die, and I'd end up stranded somewhere without any pants."

"Leske was an adult and responsible for his own actions, as was every member of that Carta," Zevran said from his position on the sofa. "You should not worry your lovely self with another's folly."

"And don't forget about little Endrin," Leliana chimed in, having followed Rica when she came. "Rica, honey, surely you do not regret making the choices that brought your darling Endrin into this beautiful world."

I looked around at my friends' smiles and promptly burst into tears. "You guys are all so _nice_," I blubbered into another of Rica's endless handkerchiefs, and laughed at myself through my hiccuping sobs.

Our lives would never be the same, and I would never have willingly traded so many people for a brighter future, but... With friends like mine, maybe it _would_ be okay. Maybe even better than okay.

* * *

_So sorry for the long wait! The chapter-buffer is sufficiently rebuilt for my sanity's sake and updates should come more regularly now. Thank you for your patience, and as always, special thanks to my valiant beta mille libri and to everyone who reads, favorites, and reviews!_


	60. The Expedition

_This is a heck of a long chapter... sorry, folks. Attempts to edit it down were only moderately successful. (Unless you're one of those gluttons for punishment who loves long chapters, in which case you're welcome!)_

_Many thanks to mille libri's frank and expert beta assistance, and thank you, too, for reading! You guys are the best!_

* * *

One of the many palace servants brought in a meal, and after hot food and conversation, I was feeling a lot closer to my usual self. I couldn't have told anyone what we talked and laughed about, but it didn't matter – what we were really saying was, "Isn't it great that we all survived?" This, given enough time, enthusiasm and, in other circumstances, alcohol, eventually transitions into "Of course we survived! We are _awesome_!" and then "WHO DIES NEXT?" but in this case was interrupted by Rocky trotting into the room, plopping his massive head on the table and enveloping an entire roast in his mouth.

"Rocky!" I cried, forgiving the breach of etiquette in my joy and throwing my arms around his muscular neck. "Who's my good, brave boy?"

Alistair joined in, rubbing the dog's fur. "Is he a hungry boy? He _is_! Somebody get this hungry boy some _steak_! Delicious juicy steak and mushrooms!"

"Do not spoil the beast, he is fine," Morrigan said as she and Wynne came in after him.

"Mushrooms are not a bad idea, though," Wynne said. "From what I've read about Mabari, they seem to do well on a diet containing plenty of vegetable matter."

Looking up, I asked her, "Is he all right to travel? I want to head out today if we can, to prove to Bhelen we're doing our best. I don't want him using this Leske thing as an excuse not to honor the Warden contract." _Or to kick Rica out._

"I think it is a fine idea," Morrigan said. "The sooner we find this pathetic, lost Branka, the sooner we can be on our way and get out of this wretched hole."

"Branka's a Paragon," I objected.

"So?"

"So, she's a living Ancestor. She's as close as we have to a God," I snapped, "and I won't listen to any disrespect. She's a master smith, she invented the fuel everyone uses – she's the reason we aren't sweeping an inch of coal dust off our floors every day."

Morrigan arched an eyebrow. "Very well, I shall strive to keep it in mind whatever I may think of her judgment, or her navigational abilities."

"I'm sure she's not lost. I'm sure she's just doing some important thing out there," I said stubbornly.

"_Aaanny_way," Alistair said with a glance at Morrigan's gleaming eye, "leaving soon sounds good to me."

I turned to Rica, who'd been so quiet most of the others had probably forgotten she was there. "Do you still have all my stuff? You didn't leave it behind, did you?"

"Of course not," she said. "It's in a trunk in my room. Shall we get it? Come with me, I want to show you all my new dresses and jewelry!"

"Sure," I said, standing to follow her.

Leliana, meanwhile, was rigid with suppressed excitement until Rica noticed her and said shyly, "You can come if you're interested."

"Interested? I'm fascinated! Dwarven fashion – nobody in Orlais knows _anything_ about what a lady of Orzammar wears," Leliana enthused as we followed Rica to her room.

Mam wasn't there. I hadn't realized I was dreading seeing her until I felt the relief of her absence. A part of me twinged with guilt, reminding me of how dearly Alistair longed to have known his mother and how I should be glad I had one, but truthfully? I really didn't want to see her, and I found it difficult to convince myself I should, now that I knew she was taken care of and didn't need me.

Rica opened a brass chest and threw back the lid. I sighed with gladness that everything was safe as I took all my stuff out and spread it on the floor. Leliana wrinkled her nose at the lingering smell of deepstalker dung, rank from sitting in an airtight box for so long, but otherwise the two women were largely engaged in trying on Rica's jewels with much chatter and delight.

I ran my hand over the things on the floor, remembering. The grappling hook made of an odd-shaped piece of scrap steel; the rope that really needed replacing; old metal jars I'd found and kept because (unlike glass bottles) they didn't break when I fell on them; the empty sacks that usually held bandages and hardtack but hadn't been refilled yet; most important of all, my battered old map so crisscrossed with ink and graphite it was barely legible.

I unfolded it tenderly and looked at all the little notes and warnings written all over it in my cramped handwriting, all the deadly dangers I'd learned to avoid over years of luck so unbelievable that every day I had felt sure the universe would collect its bill and leave me as a greasy smear on the stone. _And I'm going to bring my friends into _this_? Maybe I shouldn't..._

I repacked my bag and Leliana and I returned to the others while Rica went to feed Endrin. Our friends looked up inquisitively from the card game that had sprung up in our absence, and Alistair asked, "So, are we leaving?"

"Yeah, about that," I said uncomfortably, and sat down on a couch, hugging my pack. "_We_ aren't. I'm going by myself – although, Morrigan, if you can stand the caves, I would really appreciate it if you came with me. Giant spiders are native to the tunnels, you might not even mind if you stay in your spider shape."

There was a long, heavy silence.

"What." Alistair said the word in such a flat, stunned voice, it didn't sound like a question as much as a denial that any such thing might have been said.

"I agree." Zevran's mouth turned down. "Alone, _carina_? What would make you propose something so foolish?"

"I'm used to finding my way around the Roads by myself," I explained. My cheeks felt hot and I was sure I was blushing; it felt like bragging to talk about myself like this. "Lots of dusters go out short distances and wrangle nugs or try to mug the miners, but I used to go farther out and scavenge for the really good stuff. That's how we could afford to send Rica noble hunting – even with Bherat's help, it was still expensive. And mam was expensive to keep, and the apartment rent kept going up, and... well... Everything costs more than it used to. Every year it gets harder. Why do you think dusters are so willing to work for people like Jarvia?"

"You want to bring the _witch_ and leave me _behind_?" Alistair exploded, coming to his feet. "No! Absolutely not! I let Duncan leave me in safety once – I'm not letting _you_ leave me behind while you go off and get _killed _just like himn!"

"But, Alistair," I protested, gripping my bag tighter as though it were a shield, "I don't know if I can keep you safe! It's dangerous out there, and I know I can keep myself hidden but if I have a big guy like you to-"

"I'm sorry I'm such a _burden_ to you," he snapped. "Be sure and send Morrigan back to get me if you need anything heavy carried, like you did in Haven. Or maybe you should just replace me with a mule, they're stronger and they complain less."

"Heh, actually, Bodhan's mules complain more than a deshyr in the sun," I laughed nervously, and cursed myself for making it worse.

"Both of you, enough. Sit down." Wynne's voice cracked like a whip and Alistair fell into his chair as his legs obeyed the command without consulting his brain. Satisfied that he was settled for now, she turned to me and said more gently, "Latitia, you speak of stealth, but from what I understand of Gray Wardens, the pull of your blood goes both ways, does it not? You will not be able to hide from darkspawn. Not anymore."

I stared at her in dawning horror. Scent, sight and hearing – I'd been able to confound them all, but this new sense? Comfortable memories of lurking safely hidden were replaced by a vivid mental image of being pursued through the Roads until I dropped dead of exhaustion, unable to shake a pursuer that hunted me by blood.

"Right!" Alistair seized on this point at once. "You won't be able to hide from everything. You'll need backup. We should all go – strength in numbers, right?"

"I..." I hesitated, struggling with it. "I still don't think it's a good idea for us all to go, I mean, we won't get to choose our path. We have to follow Branka. There are parts of the Deep Roads that are knee-deep in darkspawn sludge – if Leli, Zev or Wynne have to walk around down there, they'll catch darkspawn sickness if they so much as get a paper-cut."

"And yet you are so willing to risk _me_," Morrigan huffed.

"I was thinking you could walk on the ceiling, if that's okay with you. I'd rather not have our entire mission fail just because I trip and break an ankle, and have no awesome mage around to fix it," I said diffidently. I was pretty sure that the only way she would come is if she decided so on her own, and was loath to push too hard.

"All right, so... Just me and Rocky, then?" Alistair said with an unhappy frown. He clearly still didn't like it.

"And Morrigan. If she'll come. The rest of you," I looked apologetically at Zevran, Leliana and Wynne, "I can't in good conscience take you down there. Not only would it be dangerous for you, but it'd be dangerous for our mission, too – the more people we bring, the harder it will be to keep everyone safe and fed."

Zevran shrugged. "It would be supremely false of me to claim I am disappointed at losing the opportunity to be eaten by spiders, or become a ghoul, or simply get lost and wander until I starve."

And so it was decided. I had a little shopping to do, getting fresh travel rations and replacing anything that was getting too worn, like the rope. Leliana set off with a list and Zevran to carry her bags, and I set to putting together a sort of harness for Rocky so he could carry his own water.

Bhelen's Second, Vartag Gavorn, a surprisingly warm man who seemed fond of Rica, gave us a sheaf of papers containing all the information their scouts had garnered thus far. It wasn't much. He also gave us a pass so we could use the official city gate, which was a lot more convenient than the ventilation shafts and a lot cheaper than a bribe.

"Good luck, cookie," Rica said, embracing me tearfully before we left.

"We'll need it," I said, but grinned at her in an attempt to be reassuring. "We might be gone for... a while. Take good care of little Endrin." As I'd hoped, the mention of her baby made her smile. I was glad she had him to care for and keep her from worrying.

The great gates of Orzammar were on the Commons level and used to lead to the mines. They still did, but the main tunnel had been widened and squared off to fit the ten-foot-thick ironclad doors that protected the city. I was showing our pass to the guard captain on duty when the clatter of a man running in armor came from behind us.

"Wardens," panted the newcomer, bending over and bracing his hands on his knees to catch his breath, "thank that Stone I caught ya. I thought I'd seen a Warden but for some reason I put it down to the drink."

I curled my lip at the vinegary stink of cheap liquor. I recognized the gravelly, drink-roughened voice and the flaming red hair, and I was about as interested in talking to _him_ as I was in jumping head-first into a deepstalker nest. Naked. "What do you want, Oghren?"

"I heard yeh were lookin' for Branka," he said between gasps for air. "You need me. I know what she was lookin' for, I know how she thinks."

"What do you care?" I snapped. "You're a sodding drunk who kills little boys in Proving matches. A warrior who's not even allowed to use a steak knife within city limits."

"I'm also Branka's husband, you stupid brand," he growled, straightening up until he topped me by a few inches. "And let's face it, she don't want to be found. You'll never track her without me. I have information I never gave any of those greedy deep lords. Together, we might stand a chance."

I stared at him for a long moment. I hadn't even known Branka had a husband, he'd been so eclipsed by the Paragon. I'd only known him as a tavern drunk and a laughingstock. If he'd been worrying and pining for her, it might explain why he'd gone off the deep end so badly that we could set our clocks by the sound of him retching in an alley after Tapster's closed for the night. But he was just so... _gross_. And if it was true that he'd lost control of his berserker rage and murdered that young fighter... then he was more than a little scary, too.

"Warden," Oghren added, dropping his voice a little as his shoulders softened with sorrow, "I'm the only one in Orzammar who's still trying to save our Paragon. I'm the only one who cares about her as a person, and not as some sodding symbol to be left out in the Roads where she won't offend anyone."

"Um," Alistair whispered, bending down to my level for private consultation, "It does sound like this Branka is doing her best to stay hidden. I don't fancy trying to outwit a woman who goes around inventing revolutionary new fuels and whatnot while I've been busy learning how to hold a sword the right way round. He might be helpful. At the least, he looks like he can handle himself in a fight."

"Ech," I spat in disgust. "Fine, Oghren, you can tag along. But you will do _exactly_ what I tell you to do. You will not drink one _drop_ of alcohol and sod it, Oghren, if your well-marinated arse can't keep up, I _will_ leave you behind." When his deep-set eyes flicked to my brand, I asked softly, "Is that a problem?"

"No. Sod it, no." He set his shoulders and managed a fair salute. "It's the Deep Roads. I'll kill darkspawn."

"Fine. Go on and get yourself a blanket, a bedroll, thirty feet of 300-pound-test rope..." I stopped with an irritated sigh. "We're going to be here forever. Alistair, can you take him shopping? Buy him one of everything you have. And a weapon, sod it. You'll have to carry it for him."

"Er, you're not coming?" Alistair asked worriedly.

"No." _Stone, no. I might change my mind about traveling and __**sleeping**__ alongside a violent and unpredictable man who stinks of drink. That combination is a little too familiar._ "I'm going to hang out here and look at my map. Morrigan is gonna help me make copies of it."

The two men wandered off into the Commons and I threw myself down to sit on a low stone wall and rub my forehead.

"Are we really going to look at maps?" Morrigan asked, eying me from where she stood.

"No." I thought about it and changed my mind. "Yes. We do need to make copies and your handwriting might be better than mine."

"I must say," she said as she sat on the wall beside me, "your most recent decision does not make this journey any less odious. His information had better be useful, if we are to put up with that... smell."

I agreed, and his first piece of advice didn't do much to reassure us, either. After the great gates had clanged shut behind us and we were left with nothing but the ethereal glow of the lyrium runes engraved into the walls, no sound but the distant dripping of water and rustle of sleepy bats in a nearby tunnel, I turned to him and asked, "So, where to?"

The burly warrior took a break from admiring his new battleaxe and stepped closer to me conspiratorially. I stepped back and Oghren stiffened, but went on in his rough growl anyway. "Branka was looking for the Anvil of the Void. Her first destination was going to be Ortan Thaig. That was Caridin's home, and she was sure there would be hints as to where he went. To get there, we'll need to find Caridin's Cross – that's a crossing between two of the old highways – and from there I can lead us to Ortan Thaig. No dwarf has set foot there in centuries," he added with a hint of excitement.

"Pff," I scoffed, "I was there just before I left Orzammar. It's not even a day's travel from here if you take the old coal rail. Let's go."

"But – we should still go to Caridin's Cross, I mean, what if she didn't make it to Ortan Thaig?" Oghren protested, jogging to catch up when I started down the Road.

"I don't ever go there, it's full of darkspawn according to the Legion of the Dead, and it would add days to the travel time, too. And spiders." I shuddered. "Speaking of which, Morrigan, feel free. You'd probably be more comfortable, and see in the dark better."

She nodded and swooped into her giant green spider, making Oghren flinch in surprise. Oghren subsided into grumbling about know-it-alls and weird ladies, and I was happy to let him lag behind. Hopefully his information about Branka would be more accurate than his information about the Deep Roads. Granted, it was possible that the nobles didn't actually go to Ortan Thaig, but the Legion sure did. The Legion went everywhere, but they kept their own council; maybe they hadn't told anyone. At any rate, I hadn't seen any special anvils in the Thaig, and anyway wouldn't they have all rusted away by now?

"Oghren, is this some sort of metaphorical anvil or what?" I called back over my shoulder, and was startled to see Alistair way off in the distance near the Gates. I frowned and ran back to him. "What's the problem?"

"It's, uh, it's kind of dark," he admitted, fidgeting with his shield. "And... creepy."

"No, it's not, there's light from the lava and the lyrium," I began, but realized it was a dumb thing to say. "Um... I don't know, I guess your eyes will have to adjust. They'll adapt over time, if you're sure never to look at anything bright. Keep your eyes focused on the shadows."

"Can't we light a torch or something?" he begged, giving the shadows a wild look.

"If we do that, we'll ruin everyone's dark vision and then if something happens to the torch, you'll be totally blind," I told him firmly. "How to you intend to fight darkspawn while holding a flaming stick? And anyway, where are we going to get a steady supply of torches down here?"

He slumped, letting his hands hang loosely by his sides. "I hadn't thought of that."

I took one of his hands and tugged on it playfully. "The floor is nice and smooth, and you can just follow me until your eyes adjust. Come on, big guy. You're not scared of the dark."

"How do you know?" He shuffled along after me, holding out his other hand in front of him as though feeling his way in an exaggerated display of blindness. "Maybe I just hide it really well. Maybe I cry myself to sleep at night, terrified of bogeymen. Hey, this is a really big tunnel. The roof is really high."

"That's to help with ventilation," I said and hoped he would get over the nervous babbling before we left the zone of safe space around the city. We passed a patrol, miners driving a bronto laden with lyrium nuggets and escorted by a squad of warriors, and exchanged polite nods.

"Ventilation?" he said desperately. "That's good. It could get a little ripe otherwise, everyone all crammed in together. I mean, not that it's really so crowded now, I mean, when there were more dwarves, you know, before."

I grinned at him. "You know, speaking of ventilation..." And I launched into a story of daring escapes and bold gambles, my last trip into the Roads where I'd met Vesta. _Bhelen's sister_, I reminded myself, trying to ignore the cold, squirmy feeling that I was making a poor choice of king.

Alistair listened with relief to the distraction, and Oghren drifted closer to listen about the kinds of critters he might be about to fight. The story, and its moderate embellishments, got us through to the edge of the patrolled space. Painted lines marked the stone barrier wall that blocked the underground highway and warned us to stay away, for Here There Be Monsters.

"All right, guys, this is where it gets real," I said cheerfully and led the way with Morrigan in clambering over the barricade whose stones were stained dark with the blood of old darkspawn attacks, then descended into the deeper darkness beyond. The runes were fading into disuse and the lava occasionally choked on fallen rock and backed up, cooling from its bright orange to a dull, sullen red. Lichen grew unrestricted, and an accompanying lushness of local fauna skittered around in the rough growth. Fine webs stretched between pillars and beady little rodent eyes peered out from burrows, the wildlife attracted to the extra warmth and light.

Once they were all ready and waiting, I dropped my voice to a murmur and told them seriously, "Here on out, sound is the enemy. Don't bump into anything, don't scuff your boots, don't belch after drinking from your water bottle." I gave Oghren a hard look at that, and he matched it with wide-eyed innocence. "You all are going to let me go first, and no arguing. Remember when we let Cammen scout in the Brecilian Forest because he was the one who knew what he was doing?"

Alistair nodded unhappily and Rocky licked his nose, ducking his head slightly in obedience. Oghren just looked blank, an expression I recognized from guards who had nothing to kill at the moment and were content to wait until they did. I wondered if the warrior caste practiced that look in the mirror. I couldn't tell what Morrigan thought because she had so many damned spidery eyes and no lips to smile or frown.

By the Stone, it felt good to be back. The comforting weight of the mountain over my head, protecting me; the soft song of the true tunnel as it snaked through the Stone like the veins of a living creature; the excitement and tension of pitting my wits against those of every other predator that trespassed in the dark. I ranged back and forth, moving the others from safe point to safe point in absolute silence, and damn if I didn't enjoy actually having a clue for once. Sadly, nobody else was enjoying themselves.

We turned off the main road and into a mine, old tunnels that had long ago been abandoned by their creators. Here the tunnels felt different, heavy and tight as they twisted to follow the minerals.

It was cold and getting colder, no warming lava flowing here in the bones of the Stone, and the mechanical ventilation had gone to the dust long ago. The result was a cold, dry and inhospitable environment, perfectly suited for a troop of adventurers more interested in getting to their destination than in fighting dozens of time-consuming little battles with underground wildlife. I was letting us travel together now that we were in the mine, since the darkness down here was a deep, almost viscous black that pressed against the eyeballs, and everyone wanted to stick close to the precious lyrium lamp's fitful glow.

We rested a short ways out from Ortan Thaig itself, close enough to get a little air but far enough to be reasonably safe from marauders. While we slept or took our watches, Morrigan lurked in a shadowed nook near the ceiling. The lamplight glittered off her faceted emerald eyes; I found myself flinching every time the lyrium lamp sputtered and flared and its light reflected anew from her alien face. She was still in spider shape when we set out, and I wondered for a moment whether it was usual for her to stay in animal form for such long stretches.

"Now, I don't know for sure what to expect, since I haven't been here in a while," I breathed softly to my friends before we emerged from the mine entrance. "There's deepstalkers, spiders and darkspawn in the area."

"I feel the darkspawn," Alistair whispered back with a grimace. "Can't you? It's throbbing. Giving me a dam – a blasted headache."

Surprised, I concentrated, and after a moment of holding my breath the song of the Stone faded like mist and the prickly, stinging sensation of distant darkspawn spread over my skin. "Eurgh, that is horrid," I shivered. As soon as I stopped concentrating, the song draped itself over me again, a protective blanket to keep out the monsters.

I blinked, disoriented, and was brought back on task by Rocky pushing his blunt, wet nose under my hand. "Anyway," I continued, "I'm just going to take a quick look and then if it seems clear we'll go in and look for any signs of Branka."

Alistair nodded, covered the lyrium lamp and settled back into the dark tunnel. Ortan Thaig was as darkly shadowed as ever, a Thaig without lava whose heat came instead from the steam of a hot spring under its floor, the sulfur-rich water warming the Ortan River just enough to support a flourishing population of _delicious_ crabs. I slipped into the welcoming darkness of the Thaig-

Except something was very wrong. Something felt... broken, violated, and the great power that made an ordinary cave into a Thaig did _not_ want me here. I slowed, then stopped, sheltering in a doorway and frowning into the darkness, searching for the source of my unease, when an unearthly howl burst from the Stone beneath my feet and a spectral form rose up in front of me, its mouth open unnaturally wide as it screamed in outrage at my trespassing.


	61. Ortan Thaig

The spectral figure clawed its way up from the ground and formed into a translucent dwarf, heavily armed and armored in traditional burial fashion. He bellowed a war cry and came at me, raising his axe. I stopped wondering how an insubstantial figure could make sound in favor of wondering what would happen to me if that axe hit. With a stifled whimper of terror, I bolted back towards Alistair and the others.

The spirit snarled, indignant at my dishonorable flight, and gave chase even as another scream, and then another, echoed through the cavern. When the swish of a blade came too close to my back, I altered my path to take a shorter route and passed one of the half-dozen or so unattractive statues scattered around Ortan Thaig. Imagine my surprise when the thing groaned and took a ponderous step off its dais to follow me!

"What is it?" Alistair called. He and Oghren were already out of the mouth of the tunnel, weapons ready, but their faces paled when they saw what followed me.

"By the Stone, woman, that's a sodding golem!" Oghren shouted. The thing's pounding footsteps were slow but as inevitable as a rockslide, dust sifting from its disused joints and blue light gleaming from its jeweled eyes.

"Forget about that, what are those?" Alistair demanded, pointing with his sword at the three spirits chasing me and screaming in wordless rage.

"The Thaig's ancestor spirits, I think," I panted. "Something's really pissed them off. Rocky, no! Don't touch!"

The dog stopped his lunge, skidded on the stone floor to avoid the closest spirit and leaped around it to bark at the golem. I didn't know what would happen to him if he bit an ancestor spirit, and I didn't want to find out.

"Good, Rocky, keep it busy," Alistair ordered as the dog dodged a blow from a stony fist, barking tauntingly just out of reach. Alistair caught a spirit's axe blade on his shield and shrugged it aside, following with a counterattack that sliced the spirit's left hand clean off. It fell to the ground and evaporated in a flash of purple light.

"Hack 'em apart," Oghren chortled and waded into the fray, swinging his own axe in a wide arc and lopping the spirit's head from its body. "Just my style!"

Spider-Morrigan joined Rocky, and the two of them danced nimbly around the golem as the three of us battled the spirits, wisps of chill mist clinging to our ankles. Alistair knocked the second spirit backward and onto my waiting daggers; I couldn't kill it, but the blades wedged in its armor and pinned it so Alistair could neatly slice off its head. As the spirit dissolved, we heard an oath from Oghren and I looked in time to see his opponent's blade passing through his hip the moment before Oghren's axe cleaved it in two.

Oghren staggered, though no blood fell and his armor looked undamaged. Then he threw back his head and roared, his face reddening with berserker fury, and he charged at the golem.

The golem turned, but not quickly enough. Oghren hurled himself at the huge creature, throwing his entire body into one mighty blow aimed at its head. His axe bounced off the animated stone, chipping one decorative horn, and Oghren bellowed in frustration. Without a flicker of emotion, the golem punched him square in the chest, knocking him flat on his back to skid across the cave floor with a horrible screech of metal on stone. That punch would have killed me, but he shrugged it off and came back swinging.

Oghren's axe struck sparks off the golem's body, barely leaving a scratch. Alistair bashed the golem with his shield; it instantly counterattacked, nearly throwing him off his feet and leaving a deep dent in the shield. Morrigan's venom rolled off its body, burning some lichen but leaving the stone beneath undamaged, and her webbing didn't even slow it down. Rocky's claws scraped harmlessly over it and he didn't dare bite lest he break his teeth, instead doing everything he could to distract and confuse and keep us alive.

I stared in horror at the mightiest weapon the dwarves had ever created, then down at my own puny daggers. How could we possibly kill a being made of stone – if it was even alive to _be_ killed? For all we knew, even if we crushed it to bits, it would re-form and come after us, powered by magic alone.

Magic!

"Alistair!" I shouted.

"Little busy," he said, ducking under a swinging fist. For a statue, the thing had a hell of a right hook. "What?"

"It's magical! Look at the lyrium glow! Can you do that Templar thing you do?"

He blinked in surprise, then backed away, giving himself space. I saw him gather himself, his face settling into peaceful concentration, and then he pushed his palms toward the golem like he'd done when battling Zathrian. Blue mana practically exploded out of the joints in its armor, splattering like blood across the stone, and the glowing eyes flickered and stuttered like a candle in a draft. Its arms drooped, its fingers slackening.

"Did it work?" Alistair asked, excited even though he was leaning on his shield, drained from his efforts. "I think it worked – oh, no. No, blast it, go _down_!"

The golem groaned, a strange metallic sound, and the light came back on behind its eyes. Clearly it had too much lyrium in it to be brought down by a single half-trained Templar. It rolled its shoulders in an oddly human gesture and made a shockingly quick grab at Alistair. Rocky leaped, colliding with the golem's arm so that the grab missed before jumping away again to safety. Oghren roared and struck a small chip off the golem's leg, and we were right back where we started.

"Wiggle yer fingers at it again," Oghren growled. Sparks lit the cavern for a moment as his axe glanced off the golem's back.

"I can't yet, give me a minute." Alistair still sounded strained and winded, but not as much as before. He was sparing his blade, just using his shield to deflect the heavy blows. "Got any more ideas, Tisha?"

"Uh..." I bit my lip against the panic that threatened to overwhelm. This was a _golem! _It was unstoppable!

I turned my eyes towards the monumental guardian statue who stood watch over the nearby Ortan river, begging the ancestors for help even though I knew they couldn't... do anything...

There was a crack in the statue.

A fault passed through the haft of the statue's enormous double-headed hammer, a dark line marring the beautiful planes of the carving. I'd long known it was there, and avoided sitting underneath the hammer's head, just in case the old stone finally gave way and squashed me flat. But we could never be so lucky that the carved hammer would choose to fall now and land conveniently on top of the golem... Or maybe we could, if we gave luck a little help.

"Try to lure it under that hammer," I ordered and took off running. The others followed, the golem lumbering in pursuit while I shouted over my shoulder, "Morrigan, shoot your web up to that statue's hand so I can climb up. Alistair, be ready to do that thing again when I say so."

It seemed to take impossibly long, but I reached the feet of the statue and vaulted up the geometric shapes of its armor as far as I could. Below me I heard a grunt and a crash as Alistair was smashed off his feet, and a riot of barking and snarling as Rocky struggled to keep the golem's attention. Then Morrigan's silk went shooting past my hand and stuck with amazing precision to the statue's wrist, and I ignored my distaste at its stickiness and clambered up the webbing. A series of hoarse screams announced the arrival of more ancestor spirits, enraged at our repeated intrusion, and Oghren screamed back and waded into their midst, axe swinging in great, scything arcs.

I was sure my weight alone wouldn't be enough to bring down the hammer, but I had another idea. I crawled along the haft and stopped in front of the crack, jerked my pack off my shoulders and thrust my hand into it, searching for a water bottle, remembering.

"_Bodahn, humans can't build roads for shit," I complained. "My arse is numb from bouncing over these sodding holes."_

"_Now, now," the merchant reproved gently, glancing at Sandal, who was always listening. "There's no call for language."_

"_It's not our fault," Alistair protested. "Remember, it gets cold during winter. When the water under the road freezes, it grows and breaks the paving stones. It's called a frost heave."_

"_You people have got to do something about this weather," I said, and glared up at the unreliable sky. "It's downright uncivilized."_

Back in the present, I shouted, "Morrigan, when I pour out this water, freeze it! Alistair, if this works and the stone starts to fall, stun the golem and everyone get the hell out of the way!"

I couldn't see them under the stone hammer, but I listened to the sounds of battle as I worked the cork out of the bottle and made ready to pour the water over and into the crack, fumbling with shaky fingers.

"Oghren, get the spirits off my back, I need to focus!"

"Time to dance, wispy!"

"Bowwrowrowrow!"

"Ready," called Morrigan's human voice.

That was good, because I'd forgotten she needed to change form to do magic and was already pouring out the water, moving the mouth of the bottle along the crack in the hope that some would penetrate deeply enough into the rock. "Now! Freeze it!"

"Wait, the golem's not under it anymore," Alistair warned, but too late. I jerked my hands back from the wet stone just in time as frost spread over it, and sharp cracks and grinding emanated from within the statue. I scrambled back, sliding in a barely-controlled fall down the spiderweb in case the whole statue began to crumble.

"I'm on it!" Oghren turned back from dispatching three spirits in one massive blow, and the golem was struck by a ballistic dwarf aimed right at what would have been a sensitive point, had the golem been a living man.

The golem had followed Rocky as, left to deal with the golem alone, the dog had been forced to give ground. Now it staggered back, flailing its arms, and Alistair released his focused will. Oghren scrambled away; the golem's eyes flickered and it lost its balance entirely, crashing to the ground beneath the hammer... which was falling. Falling with teeth-grating scrape of stone on stone, showering dust and ice, slow and unstoppable as a glacier but picking up speed until finally it smashed the golem to dust beneath it as though all of Ortan Thaig were its anvil.

For a moment I thought I heard another sound, the grateful sigh of a man falling into his bed after an unimaginably long day of work, and then there was silence.

Oghren swayed dangerously, and Alistair grabbed his shoulder. I frowned at the other dwarf, wondering what was wrong, and saw all the color draining from his face. Of course – the battle was over, his berserker rage no longer sustaining him. I remembered the bloodless blow he'd taken from a spirit's axe, the punch in the chest from the golem, and that was just what I'd seen.

"Morrigan," Alistair said urgently, helping the stocky warrior lie down. The witch sauntered over, obviously pleased with her role in crushing the golem, and crouched beside the limp form. She ran her hands over his body and frowned.

"Bruising and fractured ribs, that much is plain, but..." She frowned again, deeply, puzzled by whatever she was sensing. She bent and began to unbuckle the armor over his hip. Alistair helped, his familiarity with armor speeding the process.

"Guys," I whispered anxiously, though it was a bit late to be quiet, "we need to get out of here. Seriously. That sound will echo for miles, I'm not kidding, and then the predators will come." In fact, it was odd that they weren't here already. Perhaps the spirits and the golem had driven them away.

"We're not leaving until he's all right." Alistair looked up and met my eyes. "We couldn't have done this without him. He was amazing."

"Sorry, kid, I don't polish other men's swords," Oghren mumbled groggily. "But – heh – we find Branka, maybe she'll let you watch while she polishes mine."

I stifled a laugh. "Still feel grateful?" I teased Alistair, who blushed furiously.

Morrigan hissed through her teeth in disapproval at what she found under Oghren's armor. The flesh where the spirit's blade had passed was blue-white and the muscle beneath it trembled weakly. She touched the skin and jerked her hand back, "'Tis cold! We must find somewhere to warm him as soon as these ribs are mended."

She began her spellwork, and I left her side for a moment to pocket a shard of lyrium-laced rock lying beside the fallen stone hammer. As soon as Morrigan pronounced Oghren's bones strong enough to bear it, Alistair crouched and tried to help him up.

"Maker's breath, he weighs a ton," he gasped. "I thought he'd be light, like you!"

"I told you, normal dwarves are solid muscle," I said sourly. "He's built like a stone shit-house. Oghren, hang an arm around Alistair's waist and... and put your other arm around my shoulders. We'll go back to a Deep Road and find some nice hot lava."

Oghren nodded and let us help him along, his injured hip shaking violently when he put any weight on it. My stomach clenched at the smell of him, sweat and blood and sour ale, but every time his weight pressed anew across my shoulders I remembered the way he'd thrown himself into battle at our side with complete abandon, his whole being committed to each blow. Not that he was a _better_ fighter than Alistair, just different. Less tactical, more enthusiastic. Actually, his attitude reminded me of Rocky; thinking of him in that light made me feel a lot better about touching him.

We made it through a side passage of the mines and out into an empty stretch of highway, depositing the shivering Oghren beside a lava stream and sitting down for much-needed rest. I pulled the piece of rock out of my pocket to look at it.

Alistair joined me and picked it up in one gauntleted hand. "It's a finger! From the golem?"

"That's what Caridin made," I told him. "Golems. There are pictures in the Shaperate, but... nothing like the real thing. Branka must think she can find a way to make more of them." I took the finger and turned it over in my hand, adding sadly, "I hate that we destroyed this one."

"Well, it was him or us," Alistair said. He rolled his shoulders and winced. "I'm lucky he didn't break my shield arm as it is. But I know what you mean. Imagine pitting these things against the darkspawn, they're perfect!"

"That's what they're for," Oghren grunted from behind us. "With them, Orzammar had a hundred years of peace. Then Caridin just took his Anvil and disappeared."

"Oghren, something happened to piss off these guardians," I said. "Do you think Branka found something?"

"She might of, but she would have been here a long time ago – two years. It was the first place she came." He sighed, looking gray and discouraged. "Branka was here, I can see her all over this place. She used to chip samples out of the walls at regular intervals. But I was hoping we would find, like, a journal or a big sign saying 'I Went This Way' or somethin'."

"She was here two years ago, you say?" I said slowly. I was having a really bad thought.

"Yeah. Probably. Does it matter?"

"I found the Thaig about a year and a half ago." I remembered it vividly – I'd been so frightened, turned around in the mines until I had no idea how to get back to the entrance. Then I'd stumbled out into the Thaig and seen the river and that statue, and I'd crawled up between its feet and wept with gratitude.

"Yeah, so?"

"So, I found a camp. Whoever had been there before had left a notebook." I squirmed closer to Alistair, wishing I could hide; he wrapped an arm around my waist and leaned on me, tired after the fighting. "I, um... Paper is expensive, you know, and... I was lost... and I needed to expand my map because it didn't show those mines and I needed something to draw on so I wouldn't get confused trying to find my way back and-"

"By the tits of my ancestors, did you _draw_ on Branka's journal?" Oghren burst out.

"Worse," I said miserably. "I tore out the pages with writing on them and threw them away. I only wanted the blank sheets, and I couldn't read her handwriting and I didn't know!"

Oghren exploded into a fit of dwarva expletives that I was glad Alistair couldn't translate.

"Wait, wait, it might still be okay," I said, and pulled my pack off my back to dig out the notebook. I'd kept it, of course. Paper really _was_ expensive. I opened it and showed him the first page. "There's a few lines at the top of this page. I kept it because it was mostly blank. Can you read it?"

He stopped his inventive oath-spewing and squinted hard at the notebook. Then he began chuckling. "Aw, Branka."

"Why, what's it say?" Alistair asked curiously.

"It says she's going to Bownammar – to the Dead Trenches," Oghren said, still chortling. "And it says she has something to say to me that's for my ears alone. Ha! I knew she was thinking about me. Old softy."

"The Dead Trenches?" I repeated, half afraid, half excited. "But that's – that's incredibly dangerous! Only the Legion of the Dead goes anywhere near it, and they... never came back, last time they went."

"Yeah," Oghren nodded. "They say the darkspawn nest there, whole herds of 'em." His rough face settled into stony determination. "But if that's where Branka went, then that's where I'm going."

"Me too!"

Alistair gave me a startled look, not disagreeing but still surprised at my decision, and at my enthusiasm. I grinned up at him and squeezed his hand; he didn't know why Bownammar mattered, of course, but I would explain.

Now that I was a Gray Warden, I could follow the Legion. I could follow Kardol, darkspawn be damned, and tell him exactly how I'd felt about being left behind, no matter how good his "good dwarven reasons" had been.

* * *

_I refuse to believe you can destroy a golem – a 10-foot-tall being made of solid stone and iron – by poking it with a sword. Never mind daggers and dog's claws. I realize it has to be possible for the game, but dude, seriously? If they were that wussy, there'd have been no point in making them._

_Once more into the deep, my friends! Next stop: Bownammar. Thank you for joining me, and special thanks to mille libri for support and enthusiasm._


	62. The Legion

My map didn't show the way to Bownammar. Kardol's last gift had been to tear that page off and toss it into the lava, fixing me with a hard look as he warned, "Don't try to use the Shaper's map to follow me, either, nugget. You'll get lost and catch a bad case of dead, and Orzammar can't afford to waste dwarves."

But Branka had led the biggest expedition since before the last Blight, and by numbers and sheer force of will she'd found the way. Oghren pointed out chip after chip in the wall guiding the way, mysterious markings that made perfect sense to him, though he didn't see fit to explain. Instead, he was spending most of his time being violently ill. He shook so badly he could barely hold his axe, and couldn't keep anything down but dry hardtack.

Most of that was alcohol withdrawal, but not all of it. The place on his leg where the ancestor spirit had marked him remained cold and clammy despite our best efforts, and it sucked at his strength. "Theirs is the touch of the grave," Morrigan muttered during one of her brief moments of humanity before shifting back into her more comfortable spider shape.

I knew the others were having a bad time, too, even if they wouldn't admit it. Four days into the journey, when I went to wake Alistair, he growled at me and rolled over, pulling the blanket up to cover his head. Rocky groaned in agreement, flexing his paws before settling his chin on them and giving me a reproachful look.

"Come on, it's time to get up," I cajoled, rubbing Alistair's arm.

"It's nothing but night down here. How do you even know?" he snapped irritably.

"You mean you don't?" Oghren grunted, looking over at him with beady eyes and a hint of a smirk. "Stone-blind sky creeper."

"Don't you call him that!" I straightened up to glare at the other dwarf.

"Don't sweat it, girl," Oghren rumbled, his smirk broadening. "I didn't mean to rub yer man's nose in it. It's nat'ral for him to feel inadequate when ol' Oghren's around."

"Maker's breath, you're disgusting." Alistair threw off his blanket and stomped away to the crevice we were using as a latrine.

"What happened to 'He's amazing'?" Oghren shouted after him.

"Ssh!" I slapped his shoulder sharply, urging him to silence even as I glanced up and around for predators.

Rocky saw me slap Oghren and came to his feet, a growl vibrating in his chest, and Oghren's deep-set eyes flashed dangerously. "Don't touch me," he snarled, balling his fists.

Panic sank into my gut like a boulder and I crouched frozen for a long moment, struggling frantically to remind myself that _this is Oghren the warrior, not Valeska the rapist. Oghren won't hurt me like he did. My friends won't let him. I won't let him._

Rocky scented my fear and prowled closer, his head low and teeth bared. Oghren hadn't been pack long enough to earn any loyalty from the mabari. A fight between them would end badly, with one or both dead unless I intervened, and it was that knowledge that let me shoulder my fear aside and take control.

"Rocky, leave it," I ordered him, standing up and forcing my posture to straighten like I was confident with my command. "Oghren, I'm sorry I touched you, but you need to remember to keep your voice down. Do you want to fight a pack of hurlocks in your condition?"

"Branka cleared these tunnels out," he grumbled, but his hands relaxed a little as Rocky's growl ceased.

_Yeah, two years ago_, I wanted to say, but it didn't seem wise. Instead, I overrode the others' arguments and took us on a detour. We needed some help, all of us.

I had been to the subterranean lake only once, and then only because the Legion had tolerated me tagging along. I would never have come so far alone, that would have been suicide, but I'd never forgotten the lake and, by some strange twist of fate, we were just a few hours from it.

The boiling hot spring gushed forth from the heart of the Stone, creating geysers of steam and giving nearby stalactites a multicolored frosting of orange, yellow and red minerals. Some ancient engineer had built a great hood over it to capture the heat, but now only the vaguest shape was visible, its square corners softened by curtains of rock.

The water itself glowed deep blue-green, not lyrium but a strange phosphorescent algae that fed from the geyser itself. Innumerable creatures lived in that lake, all shapes and sizes, living in concentric circles around the geyser as the water cooled. Close to, a Legionnaire had told me, there were long worms with feathers. In cooler water were shrimps and snails and thousands of minnows.

"There you go," I told Oghren. "Wade on it, as hot as you can bear it. Wear your boots, though, in case you step on a shrimp."

"What?" He stared at the lake in consternation. "In there?"

"Yes, in there." I grinned, enjoying his discomfiture. "Morrigan says you've been touched by the grave. I can't imagine anything cold and dead persisting in water so hot and full of life."

Grumbling, Oghren stripped off his layers of armor and padding and waded into the water, wincing at the heat as he approached the steaming end of the lake. I sat at the shore, looking out at the rippling water. Alistair dropped his heavy pack beside me and sat down, and I pulled his arm around me.

"See, it's not all gray and dead under the mountain," I told him.

"I have to keep reminding myself that you like it down here." The corners of his mouth quirked in a smile. "I figure there have to be reasons. I mean, besides the plentiful supply of darkspawn. There haven't been as many as I'd expect, by the way."

"They're all topside, laying siege to Ferelden."

"That's a cheerful thought."

"At the moment? Yeah, it is. Would you rather they were down here? It's not like they're gonna bake us a cake and send out a welcome wagon."

"True." He smiled again, though his eyes still looked tired, and leaned down to press his lips against my hair. "It is beautiful. I'm sorry I've been such a grouch."

"This place is great!" Oghren chortled, splashing past in an awkward dog-paddle. He rolled onto his back and kicked his booted feet to spray the glowing water into the air. "It's better'n a bath! All it needs is some half-naked water nymphs to hand me a towel."

"No," I said instantly.

"Don't flatter yerself, girlie." Oghren smirked at me, but the smart-aleck remark I was going to make was cut off by Rocky coming to his feet with a woof.

"What?" I asked him, frowning.

Morrigan stood up from where she had been collecting some of the water into a small vial, in human form. It must aggravate her fear of the caves, but there were some tasks that needed hands, and I still hadn't figured out where her pack went when she was shapeshifted. She squinted into the dim recesses of the lake and said slowly, "If this lake is so rich with life, and therefore food... why is it not surrounded by creatures that feast upon it?"

I petted Rocky's back, trying to smooth down the raised hackles, but they just popped back up again. "I don't know. I didn't think to ask. Why, what does it mea- Oghren! Oghren, get out!"

Rocky exploded into furious barking and Alistair jumped up and drew his sword with an oath as I ran to grab Oghren's stuff off the multicolored cavern floor. A deep wake was moving across the shimmering surface of the lake as something big, _really_ big, shot with impossible speed towards the bathing dwarf. Oghren looked around in surprise for a moment before he caught on and began to thrash through the water.

I snatched up his gear and threw his pack over my shoulders. There would be no time for him to put it on and we couldn't afford to leave it behind. I just had to hope he'd kept his skivvies on or we'd all be learning more than we wanted to know about our new comrade. Meanwhile, a glistening shape began to rise up in the center of the wake, smaller ripples around its front hinting at the head beneath the waves.

Oghren made it to shore, blessedly still clad in his smalls, and chased after me. I was already bolting for the exit and screaming for the others to follow. We made it to the tunnel mouth when a shrill squeal shook the cavern walls and made me clap my hands over my ears. Morrigan turned back to look, her eyes burning with curiosity.

A huge worm, its segmented body as thick as a mine shaft and covered in chitinous yellow plates, piled up at the water's edge and raised its head over its looping coils. Its eyeless face ended in a wide mouth lined with ring upon ring of needle-like teeth, surrounded by lurid red, feathery fronds that might have been beautiful, if they weren't ten feet long and writhing with fury. It struck like a snake and Morrigan squawked, disappearing in a puff of black feathers just before the massive head thudded into the stone where she had been. She flapped desperately down the tunnel with us in pursuit, and we didn't stop running until we were back at the highway and its comforting lava glow.

"I guess we know why no other predators live there," I panted, grinning at Morrigan as she tried to preen a mussed feather back into place. She glared at me with her raven's eyes and did not deign to comment.

* * *

We had left the edges of my map far behind and were traveling blind, following the trail in faith that our Paragon knew where she was going. Oghren's leg healed up nicely after his dip in the hot spring, and his spirits rose to near manic heights as we approached our goal. Basically, that mean the frequency of off-color jokes and horribly bad innuendos increased until we'd all learned to tune them out.

"This is wrong," I said at last, stopping to look inside a ruined building that we hoped was an outlier of Bownammar Thaig. "There should be darkspawn here. Everyone knows there are darkspawn here."

"Branka took her whole House with her, they musta killed 'em all," Oghren said cheerfully. "Sorry I missed it."

"I suppose." I drop-kicked a genlock skull and watched it fly into the lava flow that ran alongside the Deep Road. It disappeared with a satisfying _glunk_ sound, followed by a hiss and a puff of smoke, as I wondered again why Oghren had been left behind. I'd tried to hint at wanting to know, but he was so prickly on the subject that I gave up asking. "The Legion came through, too," I added, heartened at the thought that Branka must have paved the way for them. Maybe they had made it to Bownammar after all.

We came to the edge of Bownammar's great chasm by that day's end. The Thaig straddled the yawning cleft in the Stone and used its heat for power, or at least it had when dwarves lived there. I could see little of the Thaig but its thick walls, built out over the sheer drop on the far side of the chasm, and we plodded along our own side in search of a bridge that wasn't broken.

The sounds of battle reached our ears long before we were within sight of the action. At first we stopped and looked at each other, wondering if it was just darkspawn rabble, when an achingly familiar war cry pierced the darkness and I broke into a dead run, the others jingling along behind me. A graceful bridge loomed before us, lit lanterns illuminating a broad platform on the near side, and there at the bridge's end was Kardol and his Legion of the Dead... or what was left of it.

Four dwarves fought against a tide of darkspawn with grim efficiency. No wasted swings, no unnecessary dodging that might waste precious energy in this endless battle. Together they blocked the bridge, a wall of stone and steel for the darkspawn waves to dash themselves against.

There were still plenty of darkspawn to fight when we reached them, and we hurled ourselves into the fray with gusto. I hadn't known how nervous we'd been about the lack of darkspawn until I realized what a relief it was to stop worrying and start killing. If the legionnaires were surprised to see us, they didn't show it; instead, they spread out to give us space to work, and together we reduced the darkspawn to so much wet debris.

"YES!" I shouted, punching the air as the last body sprawled at my feet. "That's what they get for messing with the alliance of Legion and Wardens!"

"_Wardens_?" a man's voice said in disbelief. I spun to face Kardol, and he shook his head to show he was disappointed that I'd let him sneak up on me. "I thought I told you not to follow me. What trouble have you gotten into?"

"I'm a Gray Warden now," I told him, with a little pride because I knew he respected Wardens even if he wouldn't show it. "We're here on Gray Warden business, and on dwarven business. Following you was just a bonus."

He pursed his lips disapprovingly for a moment, and then he gave up and grinned at me, catching me up in a bear hug. "Well, you're here, so no sense arguing. It's good to see you're still alive, nugget."

"You too," I said, trying not to cry because it would embarrass him. I'd been so sure he was lost forever.

"You and your friends are welcome to come back and get some stew with us, I don't think the 'spawn will try another assault for a while," he said, releasing me and bending to retrieve his shield. "After you clean up, of course. The rest of us aren't Wardens so we have to be careful about the blood. You remember the drill."

"I don't believe we've been introduced," Alistair said a little stiffly.

Kardol stopped and gave him a hard look. I rushed to defuse the situation, suddenly aware that at this point Alistair was probably worried Kardol was some ex-boyfriend of mine. "Kardol, this is Alistair, my fellow Gray Warden," I told him, and I took Alistair's arm to further elaborate just who and what he was to me. "Alistair, this is Commander Kardol of this Legion of the Dead. Kardol looked out for me when I was first learning how to get around down here. I owe him my life many times over." _So don't pick a fight with him, please._

Kardol's eyes traveled over Alistair, lingering on my hand where it lay on his arm, before he gave him a short nod. "Warden."

"Commander." Alistair returned the nod.

I relaxed a little and introduced Morrigan, Oghren and Rocky, and was able to name the other legionnaires once they took off their helmets. There was Baronath, the fresh scar on his cheek doing nothing to help his permanently surly expression; Shirah, the only woman I'd met who was less feminine than me and liked it that way; and Maghir, whip-thin and as hard and sharp as obsidian.

One more member had stayed behind the massive gates that led to a small offshoot of the Thaig, which the Legion had already managed to claim and fortify. Amirgan the botanist, the Legion's most unlikely member, was bent over a cauldron of delicious-smelling stew. He gave me a startled look, followed by a wide smile of welcome. Once a scholar, then a Shaper, and now a Legionnaire, he had never been a warrior and was always the odd one out. We had that in common.

"Amirgan, did you know about the giant worm-thing in that big hot spring?" I demanded.

"Did you see him?" he asked, his features lighting up eagerly.

"Yes! He damned near ate us!" I leaned over the stew pot and inhaled the fragrant steam with appreciation. They'd found some wild nug, evidently. Amirgan peppered me with questions about the worm while he served the stew, and I did my best to satisfy the insatiable curiosity that had led him to make his home out here in the deepest caverns of the earth. But, despite the warm atmosphere of their little camp, I couldn't help but notice the dozens of faces that should be here and weren't.

"Kardol," I said to him over my second bowl of nug stew, "what happened to the others?"

"The Stone took them," he replied.

"But..." I struggled to make it not sound like an accusation. "Have you been here this whole time? Just fighting and dying, one by one? Why? I thought the Legion stayed closer to Orzammar, to keep the mines clear and protect the city."

He shook his head. "I used to think so. Not anymore. It's time we start taking back what's ours. Bownammar is _our_ Thaig, and we will not stop until we've reclaimed it or gone to our final deaths."

He was so intent, so fierce in his determination that the lightweight camp spoon bent in his hand as he tightened his grip without noticing. My eyes widened and I looked away, down at my bowl. Something was wrong. The Kardol I'd known wouldn't have wasted his men in a hopeless assault. He wouldn't have abandoned Orzammar. What was in Bownammar that he wanted so badly?

I changed the subject instead. "Have you seen Paragon Branka? We're looking for her."

He blinked. "Branka? No, we haven't seen any Paragons. Don't tell me the deep lords actually care about her, after all this time."

I sighed. "Nope, they don't. They want her to come back and settle the succession. They don't care about anything except whose arse sits on that fancy chair. But there's a Blight on – did you know that? We need to pick a king so the armies can march alongside the humans and elves, otherwise the Horde will be banging on Orzammar's doors in a few months and we'll be fighting it all by our lonesome."

"Not that that would be such a big change," Kardol said sourly. He glowered briefly at Alistair, as though it were his fault that the surfacers left the dwarves to battle alone in the dark for millennia.

"Hey, don't look at me," Alistair said, holding up his hands. "I haven't even been a Warden for a year yet. Believe me, from what Latitia has told me, if it were up to me I wouldn't let the Gray Wardens sit around on the surface and wait. It'd be better to nip these Blights in the bud, down here, before waiting until they get so big they come up for air. Too many innocent people have died, and it's not fair that the dwarves bear the brunt of it."

Kardol nodded, softening somewhat. "Nugget, I think it's about time you tell us all how a little duster came to be settling the throne of Orzammar," he said, turning back to me with a rare smile.

"Aw, Kar, I'm not little anymore," I complained.

"Sorry, but to me you'll always be that skinny girl I found hiding in my supply wagon," he said, fondness warming his eyes. "Nothing but skin and bones and big brown eyes."

I rolled my eyes in exasperation as Alistair snorted with laughter. "Fine. See if you still think I'm _little_ after you find out what I've been doing," I challenged, and began a 'best-of' retelling of our journey here.

"You _crushed_ a _golem_?" Kardol interrupted after a while.

"It was him or us!"

"I know, I know, but..."

"Yeah." I sighed. "I wish we hadn't. But what else could we do?"

"Nothing." He sighed, too, wistfully. "Imagine if _we_ had a golem. We could take back Bownammar in a day."

"Commander," Oghren cut in. "Speakin' of golems. Branka is looking for the Anvil to make more of 'em, and I'm all but certain she went into Bownammar. Somehow she made it through that gate, and we're goin' after her. You and your boys wanna come? Plenty of darkspawn to go around."

"What? You're – going _in?_" Kardol repeated, shocked, and the other Legionnaires looked up, too. "We've been laying siege to that gate for months! How are you going to get in?"

"Dunno." Oghren shrugged his massive shoulders. "But Branka did, so we will, too."

"If we were ever going to make it in, it would be now," Kardol mused, his eyes regaining that strange, intense gleam. "The place is almost empty. The Archdemon flew out of here with her reinforcements just last week."

"You saw the Archdemon?" I squeaked in shock.

"It's a _she_?" Alistair sounded just as surprised.

"Aren't all dragons female?" Kardol said dismissively. "She's a big one, that's for sure. Breathes purple flame."

"But she's gone now, right?" I wanted to be sure.

"Sure." Kardol nodded, a bitter twist to his mouth. "And I wanted to get in right then, but we just don't have the men anymore."

"And women," Shirah said pointedly.

"Shirah, you know I don't give a nug's tooth what sex you or anyone else under my command is, as long as you can fight. We're all dwarves here." He reached across the table and gave her a convivial punch in the shoulder, and she grinned back. "What do you think, boys and girls? Should the Legion of the Dead march with the Wardens one more time?"

A rousing cheer went up from the table, Rocky adding his own deep-toned bay and making the nearest Legionnaire wince and cover his ears. After that, everyone went to their rooms; the outpost had been built for many more men than we, and privacy was, for once, in plentiful supply. I dropped my bag beside Alistair's in an empty room, but I didn't go in. Instead, I went and hunted down Kardol.

I found him in a small but very clean room with no furniture except a stone basin built into the wall. He was getting ready to trim his beard, but he stopped when he heard me enter the room. "What is it?"

"Why did you leave?" I asked quietly.

Kardol turned to look at me and I realized I'd done a bad job hiding the pain behind that question. He crossed the stone floor and laid a hand on my shoulder, rubbing his thumb over the collar of my tunic. "I told you why."

"You could have sent a message," I told him, trying not to sound sulky. "I thought you were dead!"

"I'm sorry. I told you not to worry." He pulled me in for a hug. "And I _am_ dead. We all are."

"You know what I mean."

He sighed heavily and released me. "I do. But I... I had to come here. We had to do this. The Stone... speaks to the Legion, and it calls me here. I thought it was calling us to our final deaths, and I would be damned if I would bring you down with me."

"Yeah," I said bitterly. "Orzammar needs women. You said."

He shook his head, his eyes sad. "It's not just that and you know it. Damn it, I'm not built to talk about my _feelings_." He said the word like another man might say 'giant man-eating slugs,' that same mixture of fear and distaste. He dropped down to sit on his bedroll and lean on the wall. He looked exhausted, and thinner than I remembered.

I went over and sat down next to him, Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing to just let it go, I thought, but then he asked me a question.

"You're sweet on that Warden? The human?"

I snorted, amused. As though there were so many other Wardens, he had to specify which species. "You could say that. He's a good man, and... he makes me feel safe."

"That's good." He was silent for a moment, fiddling with his beard scissors. "You know I would rather you could have found a nice dwarf, but I suppose that wasn't ever likely to happen, with your, er, history."

"Yeah, probably not." I laughed suddenly. "Does that make me a racist?"

He chuckled. "I wouldn't worry about it. You're looking out for your people and that's what counts. It's about time someone noticed that dusters are dwarves, too. Our people are dying, Latitia. We can't afford to let anyone fall by the wayside, and that includes you." He fixed me with a serious look. "That young man of yours better not break your heart, or I'll reach up from the Stone itself to make him sorry."

I leaned over to press my forehead into his shoulder and hide my smile. "I'll let him know."

"Do that." He pulled away gently and went back to his basin. "Now, you go get some sleep. We have darkspawn to kill. Tomorrow, the dwarves are taking back Bownammar."

* * *

_Yay, the Legion! I love those guys. I always did wonder why there were so few of them, and so far out in the middle of nowhere, though._

_As ever, thank you so much for reading, and to mille libri for beta assistance!_


	63. As Bad As It Gets

Silence fell over our little group of Wardens and Legionnaires as we looked over the remains of the Thaig, and for the first time I understood why people had stopped using its name, instead calling it the Dead Trenches.

Bownammar was gone. Oh, sure, some of the buildings were still standing, and the tessellated floors still gleamed where shuffling darkspawn feet had worn away the grime, but the Thaig was no more. Its stones were dead and silent under my boots.

"I didn't think anything was strong enough to kill a Thaig," I said, shifting my weight uneasily on the lifeless stone.

Kardol spat eloquently off the edge of the broken bridge. "Not strong. Just evil," he told me, and tightened his hand on his sword until the hilt's leather creaked.

"I can't tell where Branka went from here." Oghren stood up with a grunt from where he'd been examining the floor.

"It doesn't matter. We're clearing everything out, top to bottom," Kardol said. "Come on, lads. This place is half-empty. We get a move on, we can be done in time for dinner."

The darkspawn inside soon figured out they were under assault, and a steady stream of them poured into the square. We kept the exit at our backs, just in case, and settled down to kill darkspawn. At my request, Morrigan skittered up to a high ledge and lurked, the air too full of tainted blood for me to risk our healer.

The battle had a flow to it. The Legionnaires were rocks in the river, steady and strong against the rush. Kardol fought left-handed and it didn't take long for him and Alistair to move side-by-side, protecting each other's flank and cutting a wake in the horde, the other warriors spreading out in a V to either side. As for me, standing steady in the face of overwhelming force just wasn't my style. Together with Rocky, I danced and struck wherever I found an opening, moving with the eddies and currents, savaging their rear.

An ogre charged; we parted before it, then piled in behind it as it passed, Oghren's axe chopping into its leg and cutting it down before it had time to gather itself. An emissary threw a curse at Kardol; the Legionnaire shrugged it off, long exposure to lyrium making him even more resistant to magic, and Alistair smote it down with Templar power before it could try any more funny business. A shriek lunged from the shadows at the Legion formation's vulnerable rear, claws extended and shrill cries rending our ears, and Shirah spun like a dancer to bash it to the ground with her shield. I cut its black throat, then straightened to look for the next target, only to find none.

Alistair lifted his visor to wipe sweat off his face. "Is that all of them?"

"There's probably more scattered around," Kardol replied. "They don't tend to hide from a fight, though. Say what you will about the 'spawn, they aren't cowards. If they're around, they'll come out to fight sooner or later."

"Then let's not keep 'em waiting," growled the burly Baronath, and he led the way towards the lower levels, maul held high and ready.

Below, the lost city looked even less like a Thaig, more like a nest. Corridors were festooned with moist, stringy, horribly organic ropes, punctuated by translucent blisters, like some grotesque parody of holiday party decorations. As I stared, a slow pulse of red liquid flowed sluggishly along the vein-like ropes; I followed it with my eyes until it flowed into a blister, and peered more closely through the translucent membrane.

"Oh shit!" I jumped back from it, colliding with Alistair and knocking him into Kardol with a crash of armor. Ignoring Kardol's scowl, I pointed a shaking finger. "There's something moving in there!"

Alistair sucked air in through his teeth and bent closer to look, but I'd seen enough and edged backwards, cringing away from the fleshy substance.

"Commander," Legionnaire Maghir's voice came hollowly from under his heavy helm, a tremor creeping into his usually clipped tone.

Kardol turned to him quickly and caught him before he fell to his knees. "Easy there – where're you hurting?"

"Ogre horn caught me as he ran by," Maghir said, his hand pressed to his side. "It wasn't so bad in the heat of the fight, but I'm feeling weaker now, and I think... something feels broken up inside. "

"Morrigan," I called up to her, and four crystalline eyes peered down the stairs at me. "Do you think you can take Maghir back to the Legion's garrison and do what you can for him? I... It really doesn't look like it's gonna be safe for you down here. Too much tainted goop and it's on the walls and ceiling, too. In fact," I turned to Kardol apologetically, "you should probably all stay up there, where the taint isn't so thick."

"Girl, you know better than that," Kardol growled and shouldered past me, half-carrying Maghir up the stairs to Morrigan. "Go on, I'll catch up."

Despite my misgivings, I was glad of his and the other legionnaires' presence in those murky recesses. We walked carefully along the corridors, our elbows bumping as we huddled together in the center of the aisle to avoid the sticky walls. Thick, spongy red matter draped the walls and floor and piled up in corners; Alistair stepped on it once and sank in up to his ankle before jerking his foot out with a hiss. The air felt humid, close and uncomfortably warm, the only sounds the rattle of our own armor and the occasional distant, slow drip of water. At least, I _hoped_ it was just water.

"_First day, they come and catch everyone..._"

"Who's there?" Alistair called, lowering his sword. "Do you need help?"

"Keep your sword up, it might be a trap," Legionnaire Baronath warned, raising his own axe higher.

The unknown woman continued as though she hadn't heard them, her words slurring slightly as she chanted the next verse. "_Second day, they beat us and eat some for meat._"

"Whoever she is, she can't be a darkspawn, and that means she needs help," Alistair insisted. He stepped through the open door and led us into a room full of those same pinkish pustules. Some of them were much bigger than the others, and a few had burst open, the shredded membrane dried out and curling. Bloody scraps of meat and bones lay on the floor nearby. The disembodied voice continued.

"_Third day, the men are all gnawed on again. Fourth day, we wait and fear for our fate._"

Kardol startled us all with an oath, and he rushed the last few steps to the closest pile of rotting body parts. "By the Stone, these are dwarven bones!"

His face gone ashen, he crouched and began to push through the bones with the tip of his sword, avoiding touching any blood with his hands as was Legion custom, looking for some signs as to the corpses' identities. Legionnaire Shirah and I knelt beside him to help, holding our breaths against the stench of rot and taint.

"_Fifth day, they return and it's another girl's turn. Sixth day, her screams we hear in our dreams._"

"Oh," Shirah whispered and held up a filthy scrap of cloth with a small gold pin still attached. "Look, Oghren. Is this...?"

Oghren approached slowly, his face filled with dread.

"_Seventh day, she grew as in her mouth they spew. Eighth day, we hated as she is violated._"

"Yeah," Oghren confirmed. He swallowed hard. "Yeah, that's House Branka's insignia, all right."

"Maker's breath, it's not Branka's voice, is it?" Alistair asked, aghast.

"No, I'd recognize it." Oghren shook his head. "But..."

"_Ninth day, she grins and devours her kin. Now she does feast, as she's become the beast._"

"But she might be chanting _about_ her," I finished the horrible thought and stood up, wiping my hands on my trousers and trying very hard not to think about what I was wiping off. "Assuming the chant is about something that really happened."

"It happened."

We looked up sharply to see a hunched, shivering form emerge from an alcove in the rear of the... "Oh, sod, this is a hatchery," I said, shock making my voice too loud in the cavern's silence.

"A tainted hive," said the strange woman.

Oghren charged towards her. "Hespith! Caridin's balls, woman, what happened? Where's Branka?"

Hespith flinched from the burly warrior. "She's gone."

"Gone? What are you-"

Alistair caught up to Oghren and thrust himself between them. "Leave her alone, she's sick with the taint."

Thin and unwashed, her lank hair plastered down over a forehead slick with fever-sweat, Hespith really was a pitiful sight. Dark, bruise-like sores spotted her face and hands, and she twitched and rubbed her arms like a junkie. "Branka's gone," she repeated mournfully. "There's nothing left of her but the Anvil. She became obsessed, that is the word but it is not strong enough."

"So she's _not_ dead," Oghren seized on the chance.

Hespith shrugged. "I don't know. I hope she is. Dead would be better than... We tried to escape, but they found us. They took us all, turned us. The men, they kill... they're merciful. But the women, they want."

I met Shirah's gaze in quiet horror as Hespith's litany continued.

"They want to touch, to mold, to change until you are filled with them. They took Laryn. They made her eat the others, our friends. She tore off her husband's face and drank his blood." Hespith's features twisted in agony, and she turned away from us, walking drunkenly towards the far end of the long hall.

"And while she ate, she grew. She swelled and turned gray and she smelled like them. They remade her in their image. Then she made more of them." Hespith reached a heavy metal door and leaned on it until it swung ponderously open. "Broodmother," she whispered, and pointed at what lay beyond.

The rotten-meat stink of that room struck like a blow, crushing the air from my lungs. I took one look at the monstrosity within, all black veins and flesh and flabby gray breasts, and managed to stumble away from the others before I threw up.

"Maker," Alistair choked out.

"Dear Paragons have mercy on us," Shirah prayed.

Laryn's massive, mutated form lay sprawled throughout the huge cavern. Veined ropes and tendrils spread out from her like spiderwebs and that same red, fleshy substance extruded from beneath her, and for a panicked moment I wondered if it was all _part_ of her, and if she'd felt it when Alistair stepped on the stuff. Her grotesquely swollen body left no doubt as to her purpose, covered in row upon row of drooping breasts. The way her head sat atop the gray body with its flaccid, useless arms reminded me of nothing so much as a tick, so engorged with blood it was near to bursting. If she had legs, they had been crushed under her mass long ago. Maybe that was part of why she smelled so bad.

"We have to kill her," Kardol said flatly.

Baronath grunted, "If not for her sake, then to stop her from spawning any more."

"Agreed," said Shirah. Her hand trembled, but when she raised her sword, the blade was steady. "If there is any mercy in your hearts, Wardens, you will help us return her to the Stone's embrace."

"You don't have to ask me twice." I wiped my mouth on the back of my sleeve and drew my daggers, then paused to look up at Alistair. "I want your word – your sworn word – that you will kill me rather than let me be captured."

"Latitia, I – I can't promise to..." Alistair's face was white and strained behind his visor.

"Less talkin', more killin'," Oghren growled and ran forward, leading the charge.

Rocky let out a hunting howl as he ran, and Laryn turned her tiny-looking head towards us. Then she let out a scream, and when we heard that bestial sound I realized Laryn was long gone. Only the broodmother remained. The huge, twelve-feet-tall, stinking broodmother, who was _not_ as helpless as we had thought and had no desire to be killed.

Her scream rattled the cavern and shook droplets of water and mucus down upon us from the canopy of her tentacles. In the lead, Oghren and Rocky were too close; the dog yelped in pain and Oghren staggered and fell. Alistair caught up to him and hauled him back to his feet, blood running out the bottom of Oghren's helmet.

Rocky reached the broodmother and leaped for her face, and for an instant I thought it would be that easy, but at that precise moment a mottled tentacle as thick as a tree trunk shot out of the spongy floor with a _slurp_ and slapped the dog out of the air. He twisted and clutched at the tentacle, his claws scoring deep lines in the tough skin, but there was nothing to grip and he was flung into a pile of egg sacs.

"Watch out, there's darkspawn coming!" Alistair shouted, pointing at a side door. Kardol turned back quickly and he and Alistair met the rush of darkspawn called by the broodmother's scream in a crash of steel.

Three more tentacles erupted from the pulpy mass beneath the broodmother, whipping wildly through the air as the scream went on and on. Shirah shrieked as a tentacle wrapped around her waist and hoisted her into the air; the broodmother held her up, the fat face vaguely curious, then turned her upside-down and shook her as though to see what would fall out.

"Shirah!" Baronath bellowed and dropped his shield, taking his axe in both hands and hacking at the tentacle. Blood and yellow lymph gushed out from it and the tentacle lost some of its strength, drooping towards Laryn; Shirah's sword fell from limp fingers towards the broodmother's chest

It hit tip-down and sank in several inches, and the broodmother's scream cut off in a sharper squeal of pain, but the layers of blubber and breast tissue covering her front kept the thick blade from reaching her heart. Baronath chopped once more at the tentacle crushing Shirah and raised his axe a third time, but another tentacle swept his feet out from under him. His helmeted head hit a protruding stone with a loud _crack_ and he lay stunned.

The broodmother flicked Shirah away, and a moment later the rapidly-deflating tentacle flopped to the ground like stinking noodle. Then her beady little eyes, barely visible under the folds of fat around her face, focused on me.

I gulped and, ducking the tentacle she swept at me, scrambled forward and threw myself at her gelatinous body, aiming as high as I could reach. Both daggers sank deep and the yielding flesh tore as I tried to use the blades to hoist myself up her body. An instant later a tentacle slapped me hard across the shoulders, crushing me against her belly so I couldn't breath. Panic welled up in my throat and then a heavy battleaxe bit deep, a little too close to my arm for comfort, but it lopped right through the tentacle and I could breath again.

The broodmother screamed, blood gushing from the tentacle stump and her fat arms flailing in pain. Rocky was back in the fight, and so was Baronath, the two of them struggling with a third tentacle as it snapped and whipped around them, but it had been Oghren's axe that freed me.

Oghren snarled, "Go on, get up there and finish her!" He grabbed the back of my leather vest and heaved me up, literally throwing me at the broodmother's chest.

I gasped in surprise but managed to keep my grip on my daggers, my toes finding some purchase between layers of udder-like breasts. I ignored what I felt under my hands and feet and hauled myself with gritted teeth up her front. Behind me, I could hear Alistair and Kardol battling the darkspawn guards, plus Baronath and Oghren's grunts and Rocky's growls as they did their best to keep the thrashing tentacles off my back.

Blood was welling up around the sword in her chest and rendering her body slippery; my foot slipped and my left hand lost its grip on a dagger. I swung for a heart-stopping instant, all my weight hanging from one dagger, and then it tore free, slipping through my grasping fingers and spinning away below me. I grabbed for anything I could reach, caught hold of the broodmother's wasted, flabby left arm, and hung on desperately.

A tentacle whipped past the two dwarves below and whistled through the air as the broodmother let out a fresh howl of anguish; it slapped into my leg and wrapped around it, forcing a pained cry from my throat. Rocky leapt after it, latched onto the tentacle with his jaws and sheared through, a chunk of sinewy muscle tearing free, and I felt the tentacle's bruising grip slacken. I kicked and struggled and pulled my leg free, but my daggers were out of reach. I thought that was it, I was done, when my eyes landed on the hilt of Shirah's sword sticking out of the broodmother's chest.

I swung my legs and twisted, forcing myself up higher, then lunged with and caught hold of the sword hilt. I wrenched the sword from side to side, driving it in deeper, and her struggles grew more frantic. Her little arms flapped at me, their claws scratching over my leathers, and she tried to spit something at me that missed and splattered onto her belly and began to sizzle.

Grimly, I hung onto the sword, and _twisted_.

The blade quivered – I'd found her black heart! Blood geysered from her bloated body and shot the sword out with it. My arms windmilled for a moment, and then I was falling backwards in a waterfall of blood and really, really hoping I would land on something soft.

I landed on Alistair, which was even better, his strong arms catching me before I hit the ground and pulling me back and out of reach of the broodmother's death throes. She flailed in mad panic for a few seconds, her mouth wide in a despairing squeal, but at last, she went still.

"Are you okay?" Alistair asked me. He seemed reluctant to put me down.

"I will be," I said, my eyes drawn back to poor Laryn's crumpled body. "Better than her, anyway."

"Let's get out of here," he said sadly, and I nodded. When he tried to set me on my feet, the leg the broodmother's tentacle had grasped gave out at the ankle, so instead he heaved me up onto his back.

Kardol found Shirah against the rear wall of the cavern, unconscious, her armor crumpled and blood seeping slowly from her mouth. He and Baronath had a shouting match over who would get to carry her out, which Kardol won by default when Baronath staggered over to a corner and began throwing up.

"What-" I started to ask, tensing in alarm.

"Concussion," Alistair explained.

Kardol unbuckled Shirah's ruined armor to lessen her weight and lifted her into his arms, Baronath leaned on Oghren for balance, and together we made our weary way out to Morrigan and safety.

She had Maghir already stabilized and sleeping by the time we made it back. Amirgen, the Legionnaire who had remained behind to guard the compound, helped us wash off the darkspawn blood and took away our gear for cleaning before Morrigan set to work patching us back together with spell and elfroot.

Head wounds and internal injuries got first dibs on the healer, and the next few hours were lost in a haze of pain as I waited for my turn, huddled in Alistair's lap with my leg stretched out stiff in front of me. Miraculously, Alistair had made it out with only a few scrapes and bruises, so he had nothing to distract him from fussing over me. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the attention.

Finally, I got my turn; a short spike of cold and pressure in my ankle, followed by a strange sucking sensation, and Morrigan pronounced the fracture repaired as long as I didn't do anything "more foolish than usual." I thanked her and got up, meaning to find something to eat, but on the way to the kitchen area I passed Kardol standing in Shirah's bedroom doorway, watching her sleep. I stopped, and Alistair hesitated beside me; I gestured for him to go on to the kitchen and eat, because I knew Kardol wouldn't like to talk in front of him.

"Is she gonna be okay?" I asked him.

He shrugged. "Shirah... won't wake up, and your witch wouldn't tell me why."

My stomach felt cold; if Morrigan wouldn't say why, she probably didn't know. She didn't normally pass up an opportunity to sound knowledgeable. "I'm sorry," I said lamely.

Kardol didn't answer for a long time, and it wasn't until I noticed the way his mouth was working that I realized he was fighting for control. Eventually, he just grunted, "Not your fault."

"Shirah would be proud to go down in a battle like that one." I considered putting a hand on his shoulder, but wasn't sure if he would welcome comfort.

"I know." The muscles in his jaw flexed as he clenched his teeth for a moment. "We are the Legion of the Dead. It is our duty to die in defense of the Stone. Better here, now, than in some stupid scuffle in a back alley, or from choking on a bone."

"Or old age."

"Stone forbid." He stood and watched the slow rise and fall of Shirah's ribs for another few breaths. Then he clenched his fists and turned away. "I'm going back to the Thaig."

"What? Now? Alone?" I limped after him, my ankle still pretty tender. "Why? Kardol, stop! At least rest first!"

"I can't. I can't risk the darkspawn reclaiming it while we're gone." He stormed through his room, grabbing sword and shield and bedroll without slowing down.

"What are you going to do about it if they try? _Die_ at them?" I demanded.

He ignored me, pushing open the door to the compound and striding for the bridge that crossed Bownammar's defensive chasm.

"Kardol, don't you darewalk away from me again," I snarled at his back. "Don't you _dare_. I'm not a little girl anymore. Get your arse back here or by the Stone, I'll – I'll-"

He looked back at me over his shoulder, amused. "You'll what?"

"I'll _follow_ you." I began limping down the steps towards the bridge. I hammed it up a little, adding the occasion pained whimper.

He swore a blistering oath and came back, holding out a hand to stop me. "Go on inside, nugget. You need to lie down."

"So you can leave me behind? Like you're leaving Shirah behind?" I looked him hard in the eyes. "She's here because she trusted you. Are you gonna repay her by leaving her to die alone?"

He avoided my gaze. "Baronath-"

"Baronath is sleeping off his concussion," I snapped. "What is wrong with you? This isn't the Kardol I know."

He finally turned his dark eyes up to mine, and I could see the conflict raging within. He struggled, caught between two powerful urges, and it frightened me enough that I took a step back. Then his body relaxed, something indefinable changing in his expression, the alien gone from the familiar face.

"You're right," he said, moving briskly back into the compound. "I don't know what got into me, nugget. I just – there's something... _calling_ me. I thought the Stone wanted me to retake Bownammar, but... The Stone wouldn't call me away from my sworn duty to my men."

I followed, my eyes on his broad back and Hespith's warnings about _obsession_ ringing in my ears.

* * *

_I truthfully couldn't think of anything more intense than the game's own content. I feel a little guilty for following it so straight, but... well, I wanted to make sure my mom, who hasn't played the game, gets to have the full experience. Happy Mother's Day, Ma, I got you a Broodmother!_

_Special thanks to Raven Jadewolfe, Enaid Aderyn, Arsinoe de Blassenville, Eva Galana, roxfox1962, Nithu, Shacary, Caleb Nova and interesting2125 for your generous reviews, and extra-special thanks to my fabulous and unflappable beta, mille libri!_


	64. The Anvil of the Void

_Early update because I was impatient to share this chapter. Hugs and love for all my readers, and for my enthusiastic beta, mille libri!_

* * *

"So," Alistair said when I joined him and Oghren in the Legion outpost's kitchen, "does anyone want to talk about what happened, or are we going to keep our heebie-jeebies to ourselves?"

"I don't want to see your 'heebie-jeebies,'" Oghren rumbled between bites of baked fish.

I ignored him and picked up a plate, helping myself to the fish. "She was pretty awful."

"Which 'she?'" Alistair said with a shiver of horror that sent the leaves of his mail rustling. "The broodmother, the ghoul, or the leader who abandoned them?"

"Yeah." I looked at the plate I'd just filled for a moment before scraping the fish back onto the platter. On second thought, I wasn't hungry. How could Branka, a _Paragon_, so betray her own people? It was unthinkable.

"I don't believe it," Oghren said, echoing my thoughts. "I _won't_ believe it. That my Branka would... and with Hespith! She's not even that hot!"

"Wait a minute," Alistair interrupted. "After all that, what you're most upset about is that Branka cheated on you?"

"Is it even cheating if it's with another woman?" I asked rhetorically.

"_Yes_," both men said in firm unison.

I grinned for a moment at having successfully poked fun at them before returning to more serious matters. "Really, though, Alistair, finding out about broodmothers is important information. Did the Gray Wardens know?"

He shook his head slowly. "I don't know. Duncan never mentioned, but then I never asked."

I nodded. "I never wondered where darkspawn come from, either. I guess I just never thought of them as animals that reproduce. They seemed more like, I dunno, a fungus or a disease of some kind. Or bad weather. Something that just happens, and it sucks, but there's nothing you can do about it."

The piece of sacking that functioned as a door was pushed aside and Kardol came in, with Amirgen the botanist close on his heels and as excited as a dog in a ball factory. Kardol sat heavily on a bench and leaned back against the wall, stretching his legs out with a wince of stiffening muscles, and said, "I think we have an opportunity here."

"Agreed," said Amirgen. "I've wondered for a long time why we never see any female darkspawn. The answer is now clear: there aren't any!"

"Fascinating," Alistair said dryly.

"Yes, yes," Amirgen bobbed his head in enthusiastic agreement, impervious to sarcasm. "Now that we know they must capture live female prey to reproduce, we have a chance to actually destroy them, once and for all! All we have to do is prevent darkspawn from seizing female prisoners."

"How are we supposed to protect every woman on the face of Thedas?" Alistair objected.

"Yeah," I said. "I mean, Alistair would do it personally if he could, but Thedas is a big place, full of holes where darkspawn can pop up and capture someone. It's not one single city with a wall like Orzammar."

"Oh." Amirgen looked discouraged for only a moment. "But at the very least, we can ensure no more women join the Legion or are allowed out on patrols or expeditions."

"That will make us popular," Kardol grunted. "Not that it matters. This is possibly the most important discovery in generations, and our duty is clear."

"We can talk directly to Bhelen if we get him on the throne," I said. "He'll owe us. He'll have to believe us, and if we tell everyone why, I doubt there will be many women willing to ever leave the city again."

"I..." Kardol started to speak, but his throat seemed to close on the words. He swallowed hard and forced himself to continue, his face paling with the effort. "If she makes it through the night, I'm taking Shirah home. I won't let her survive this injury just to become... that, if the darkspawn come back and overrun our position."

"You're leaving Bownammar?" I said, surprised. "But you seemed so determined to stay."

"I still want to," he admitted. "More than anything. But it's not about me. I don't know why I want Bownammar so badly, but it can't be the Stone. Nugget..." He met my eyes in deadly earnest. "You better be careful. There's an evil down there, deeper than anything in all our lore."

* * *

Alistair, Oghren, Rocky and I went back into Bownammar as soon as we felt rested enough. We needed to pick up Branka's trail again, and we didn't want to risk darkspawn coming back and waiting to ambush us. Morrigan rode on my shoulder in her raven shape, so that she could fly away without touching anything tainted if we ran into trouble.

Every fluid-filled egg sac we'd seen before was now wilted, shrunken, the unformed genlocks inside them lying still and very dead under the collapsed membrane. Seeing them for the first time, Morrigan shuddered and flattened her feathers in distress, and for a long time I felt her shaking through the talons that gripped my shoulder.

There was no way around it; the darkspawn had blocked off every exit except the one that led to the broodmother's cavern. We crossed it in a series of awkward hops to avoid the tendrils and red fleshy matter that covered the floor, and at last found an exit that bore Branka's telltale marks.

"Warden," Oghren said, punching Alistair's arm to get his attention. "We're getting close, I can feel it. If Branka is anywhere, it's here, and she will not be unprepared."

"Unprepared?" I frowned at his back. "Won't she be happy to see you?"

He turned around and grinned horribly at me, his beard bristling every which way and his teeth bared. "Would you be happy to see this comin' at ya?"

"Fine, pretend you don't care and nothing ever bothers you," I snapped, and instantly felt wished I hadn't. That he was hurting could not be denied, and it wasn't fair of me to pick at his scabs. Oghren, for his part, ignored me and forged on, his stocky legs pistoning in steady rhythm.

We traveled along a rough, meandering tunnel for a short time before emerging into a natural-looking cavern, all rounded edges and cathedral ceiling. For a moment we just squinted around in the darkness before a tiny figure moved on a ledge near the cavern's rear. Oghren gave a joyous shout and broke into a jog, waving his hands wildly to get the figure's attention, and we followed.

Behind us came a clang of steel on stone, and I spun to see thick metal sheets fall from above the tunnel entrance, blocking it. "What the-"

"You'll forgive me for being blunt. After all this time, I have little patience for social graces."

"Branka!" Oghren chortled. "I barely recognized you!"

I would have to take his word for it, because she looked nothing like any Paragon I knew. Granted, I had never met her, but I had seen enough pictures and statues to know what a Paragon was _supposed_ to look like, and it wasn't a short and unattractive woman with stringy pigtails and narrow, shrewd eyes, dressed in armor that looked like it had already been battered even before she'd used it to force her way through hordes of darkspawn.

"Oghren." Branka's eyes narrowed even further. "I should have known you would find your way here eventually. Now you can find your way back again."

I watched her argue with Oghren for a little while longer in growing confusion and disbelief. Branka's family and followers hadn't been captured by the darkspawn. Branka had given them up, _knowing_ what would happen to the women, ignoring their pleas, to ensure a steady supply of new darkspawn for her to trap and throw at the defenses surrounding the Anvil.

And now, apparently, it was our turn.

"Is this what our empire should look like? A crumbling tunnel, filled with darkspawn spume?" Branka went on, pacing as she spoke with feverish passion. "The Anvil will let us take back our glory!_T his_ is important! _This_ has lasting meaning! Nothing else matters in the face of restoring our people. Surely you can see that!"

Oghren spread his hands. "What has this place done to you? I remember marryin' a woman you could talk to for one minute and see her brilliance!"

Branka's face hardened. "I am your Paragon." She turned and walked away along her ledge, where we couldn't follow.

I broke. "You're no Paragon of mine," I screamed at her disappearing back. "You're just a sodding inventor, a tinkerer, nothing more, and when you die the Stone will spit you back out!"

She paused a moment. "Possibly. It matters little." Then she was gone.

"So let me get this straight," Alistair said after a few seconds of ringing silence. "Branka has been down here trying to solve this puzzle for two years and she hasn't even gotten past square one, and she thinks _we_ can solve it on the first try?"

"No," I snarled. "She'd be glad if we died, the heartless bitch."

"This isn't her," Oghren said, and I was shaken out of some of my anger by how small he looked all of a sudden, standing next to Alistair. He had sunk in on himself until it seemed only his heavy armor was holding him upright.

"Let's go," I said. "You heard her. There's no way out but forward. Come on, Oghren, I need your blade up front with me."

There were darkspawn, oh yes. Frantic, trapped darkspawn that looked somehow unfinished, as though they'd been forced into the labyrinth straight after hatching and before their soft features had hardened into the traditional grimace. They flailed at us in panic and were cut down, to lie with the other bodies stacked sometimes two or three deep on the tunnel floor. The stink, of course, went without saying. I wished it went without smelling, too. After a little while, my nose began to shut down in self-defense.

We met no other resistance, passing instead the occasional blade trap whose blade was fouled with too many bones to swing anymore, or flame trap that had long since run out of fuel. It seemed like Branka's brute force method might have been working, until we came to a room with a recessed floor filled with a slimy greenish mist that looked distinctly unhealthy.

"Huh," Alistair said.

"Yeah, that about sums it up." I poked at the mist with the toe of my boot. It swirled and the leather began to discolor. I stepped back hurriedly.

Twin blue lights shone out of the depths of the mist, and I gasped in sudden fear as the dark shape resolved into a golem. Before I could shout a warning, the golem sighed creakily and began to speak.

"Duster," it said. Its voice was like the creeping of a glacier on gravel.

"What?" I asked warily, poised to flee. Beside me, Alistair tightened the straps on his shield with grim, efficient motions.

"Victim," it said.

"Says you!"

"You are forced here by another's hubris. You are enslaved to her will."

I blinked. "Okay. Sure. So?"

"I am sorry. So very sorry for my crimes against your casteless ancestors." The golem moved, and I drew in my breath with a sharp hiss and crouched to flee, but it walked ponderously away from us. It faded into the thick mist, but I heard a sort of mechanical ratcheting sound, and then the mist began to dissipate.

"Follow this servant," the golem said, its form becoming clearer as the mist evaporated. "It will guide you safely through these defenses that are not meant for you."

"Could be a trap," Oghren grunted.

"Yes," Alistair said dubiously. "A trap would be a lot easier to believe than someone actually being helpful. That _never_ happens."

I glanced up at him. "Given a choice between picking a fight with a golem and trusting him, I choose trust, at least this time. I'm fresh out of giant stone hammers."

I was glad I'd made that choice, because we passed literally a dozen more golems, their eyes dimmed and hands loose by their sides, not to mention the elaborate blade and fire traps that made my head hurt just to think about. At last the golem opened a door to a great hall, blisteringly hot and lined with two rows of golems standing silently in alcoves. Lava poured down the far wall, behind a promontory of rock that stuck out over a river of magma. A single golem of enormous stature, made of steel instead of stone, stood at the far end, holding a two-foot metal rod that looked like a toy in its enormous fist.

"I am Caridin," said our guide, but the voice came also from the mouth of the steel golem in perfect unison and we turned from one to the other in confusion. Then our guide went still, its eyes going dark; the steel golem put down the rod and went on speaking alone. "Once, longer ago than I care to remember, I was a Paragon to your people."

"What? You're Caridin? As in _the_ Caridin?" I said blankly, stunned.

He inclined his head. "If you seek the Anvil, you must care about my story."

"We're listening," I said, which was true. I couldn't believe Caridin was alive, and I was _talking_ to him. Caridin of Caridin's Cross, who had made those wonderful golems and kept our people safe for so long. Now this was a _real_ Paragon, not a Johnny-come-lately like Branka.

He had created the Anvil, he explained, and it had brought him fame and fortune, and created an invincible army. "But I told no one the cost," he finished sadly, and my eagerness froze into heavy dread. "No mere smith has the power to create life. To make my golems live, I had to take their lives from elsewhere. I dressed men in a skin of armor, so large it makes the burliest look no more than a babe, the anvil their first and final cradle. We were surrounded by a mile of earth on all sides. No one heard the screams as I poured the molten lyrium..."

"Oh no," I whispered. Tears spilled from my eyes and rolled down my cheeks, unheeded. "Oh, no. Not you."

"I only intended to use volunteers," Caridin said, almost pleading. "But the king was not satisfied, and soon a river of blood flowed from this place, and most... were casteless, like you. Nobody spoke out against it. No one cared what became of the people no one wanted."

"Maker," Alistair breathed.

"Finally, I refused, and King Vartag had me put on the Anvil next," Caridin said grimly. "But my apprentices did not know enough to make a control rod to contain my will. I entombed us here, seeking a way to destroy the Anvil, but I cannot. No golem can."

"I'll do it," I said instantly. I was shaking with horror and revulsion, my ears filled with the quiet sigh the golem had made when we finally managed to kill it. _That poor, enslaved bastard. I hope he finds his way home to the Stone._

"No!" A wild scream came from the rear of the hall and we spun to see Branka race in after us, panting. "The Anvil is mine! No one will take it from me!"

"It's Caridin's, you arrogant slag," I shouted, furious.

"Just give her the blasted thing," Oghren said desperately. "She's confused – maybe once she calms down, we can talk to her."

"Absolutely not, she's shown us what kind of woman she is," I said flatly, then turned back to Branka. "I wouldn't trust you with my worst enemy – I won't trust you with this. I'll die before I see you take it."

"Then die," she snarled, and raised a short bar of metal over her head. "You're not the only master smith here, Caridin! Golems, obey _me_! Attack!"

"A control rod!" Caridin exclaimed. His body went rigid, trembling under the magical compulsion blasting from the unassuming rod. "Warden, stop her!"

Golem eyes lit up, one by one, and the closest took a creaking step forward. Morrigan flew into the air with a caw and flapped up toward the ceiling as Alistair drew his sword and Rocky began to bark an impotent threat at the golems. I had out my daggers, too, but I just stared at Branka. Despite my blustering words, she _was_ my Paragon – could I dare to raise a blade against her directly?

"Branka," Oghren begged. "Don't throw your life away for this."

Branka sneered at him and drew her gleaming mace. "I am a Paragon. I cannot be defeated."

She raised her mace and hurled herself at him with a shriek of rage, and Oghren the warrior shoved Oghren the husband violently aside. His mighty blade swung in a blur, faster than I would have believed possible, and sheared through Branka's upraised hand and into her throat. Oghren screamed in rage and anguish, a wide spray of blood splattered across the stones, and an instant later the control rod landed on the wet surface, cleaved in half. Branka's mouth opened in disbelief; then her eyes clouded and she fell.

Oghren stood over her broken body, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Around him, golems paused in the act of raising their fists or picking up boulders, blinked as though not sure what they had been about to do, then paced calmly back to their alcoves.

Caridin groaned like a creaking door and shuddered as the compulsion left him. "Another life lost because of my invention. I wish no mention of it had made it into history."

"Time to put an end to it," I said, my gaze fixed on Oghren's shuddering back.

Caridin held out his massive sledgehammer, and I took it, grunting as at the weight. Slowly, I walked up the stone peninsula, heat shimmering in the air as the thermals rose on both sides from the lava below. Before me lay the Anvil of the Void.

It was... _beautiful_.

A thing of strength and elegant simplicity, pulsing with lyrium veins like a living heart. Enchantment rolled off it in waves, passing over my skin in a thrilling rush. Perfection like this world has never seen before or since. Power greater than any one man could contain.

I had to destroy it.

But it was so beautiful. We had searched for so long to find it. So many had died... All of House Branka, the battalions of soldiers sent in ages past, the entire Legion of Steel, sacrificed to find this marvel, this paragon of perfection. Would their sacrifice be for nothing?

Who was I to dictate the fate of my people, anyway? I was no Paragon... how could I, a mere brand, be so presumptuous as to think I knew better than Branka? We needed the Anvil. I would be leaving for the surface and the darkspawn would return. All our pain and blood and effort, the lost Legion, would mean nothing because without the golems, we could never reclaim the Deep Roads.

Caridin had said some people volunteered. That was their business, right? Plenty of dwarves would volunteer, even if they knew of the pain. An ageless and powerful body, immune to injury and fear... There are worse fates. The Anvil wasn't evil. It was a tool. We could use it for good. Even if we never made another golem, what we could learn from this masterwork was beyond imagining.

"Warden?" Oghren said warily from a few steps behind me. "Don't screw this up. Smash it."

"I can't," I whispered, and the head of the hammer fell to the floor as I lost the strength to lift it.

"Sod it, Warden! Are you telling me I killed my wife for nothing? Give me that, you spineless nug-licker!" And he lunged for the sledgehammer.

"No," I gasped, jerking it towards me. "You can't! We need it!"

"We?" Alistair repeated. I hadn't noticed his approach. "What 'we?' I don't need it. Your sister doesn't need it. Maker's breath, Tisha, it was dusters like you who suffered the worst! How can you willingly give Bhelen the tools to enslave them?"

"He wouldn't..." But then I thought of the man I intended to place on the throne, really thought about him. Bhelen had made it very clear that he would do whatever he thought necessary to restore our people. I'd had reservations, even then, about what that might mean, and I still worried I was giving power to a violent animal. And now I meant to give him the Anvil, too?

_You could protect me. You wouldn't let him do evil with me. I am but a tool._

There were no words; instead, the meaning impressed itself directly into my mind. All at once, I sensed an immense elemental awareness, a vibrant _life_, coming from the Anvil itself, and I knew what had happened to Branka, what had almost happened to Kardol.

The Anvil wanted to be free. It was hungry to be used again, and it called out with seductive whispers. It had absorbed so many lives that it had grown into a kind of life itself, or maybe Caridin had given it life. I would never know, now, because my path had become clear again.

I had to destroy it. It would whisper to Bhelen and call him to use it, to create more and more golems, convincing him it was necessary. It had twisted and perverted Branka into slaughtering – and worse – her entire House, and it had called Kardol here to grind his Legion into dust against the gates of Bownammar; what horrors could it do with the King of Orzammar? How many good dwarves would be lost to its seduction?

With all my strength, I swung the sledge over my head and brought the massive hammer down on the Anvil, ignoring its scream of rage. Cracks appeared on its surface, light blazing from within, and it shrieked and actually writhed as I brought the hammer back for a second blow. It shattered, and with a despairing wail, the burning pieces of the dwarves' greatest creation fell from the stone platform and into the waiting magma.


	65. The King of the Dwarva

I dropped the hammer from shaking hands, turned away from the empty pedestal, and jumped when I found my nose an inch away from Caridin's decorative belt buckle.

"Thank you, my friend," Caridin rumbled. I stepped around him and away, so I could see his face. "Is there any boon I can grant you for your aid?"

I shrugged, stuffing my hands into my pockets and hunching myself small in reaction to how lost I felt. We'd failed, completely and utterly. We had killed our only living Paragon and destroyed the Anvil of the Void, our people's last best hope for survival. _What will I tell Bhelen?_ I wondered in near-panic. Alistair came up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder. I leaned against him and my gaze fell on Oghren. _Poor blighter. Imagine waiting two years for your wife, then fighting your way out here to save her, only to leave her dead on the stone?_

I said, "Oghren? Do you want anything? You might as well get something out of this shitstorm."

"Uh," Oghren squinted owlishly from me to Caridin and back. "There _is_ still the matter of the election. I mean, we still need a Paragon to get the Assembly's support, right?

_We?_ I stared at him in disbelief. After all this, he just wanted to help _us_? Then the second part of his statement finally sank in: duh, Caridin was a Paragon, too – we didn't need Branka if we had him. At least, not for the election.

Caridin nodded and spoke hollowly, "Very well. For the aid you have given me, I shall put hammer to steel one last time, and give you a crown for the king of your choice."

He strode to a second workspace, its anvil made of ordinary, non-life-drinking steel, and dug around in a bin of metallic ingots until he pulled out a lump of solid gold. This he began to bend and stretch with the strength of his iron fingers, the metal beginning to glow cherry-red with the heat of the friction and, perhaps, some magic of his own. I left him to it and wandered listlessly over to the wall, where I slumped down on the ground to rest. I was so tired. Rocky padded over and flopped with his head in my lap and I began giving him an ear rub, glad of the uncomplicated interaction. Alistair joined us and took over belly-rubbing duties.

"Poor fellow," he murmured, watching Oghren where he stood with slumped shoulders looking over the lava river.

"You better not let him catch you pitying him," I said.

"Well, no. But still." He sighed. "What do you think he'll do now?"

"No idea. He's banned from carrying weapons in the city, it's not like he has a lot of career options. Maybe he'll join the Legion of the Dead?"

Alistair snorted with a suppressed giggle. "Oh Maker, can you imagine Commander Kardol being stuck down here with Oghren's horrible jokes?"

Making the crown seemed to take hardly any time at all. Caridin finished it with his hammer for that authentic forged look and added his house seal with a single, precise tap from a carved steel punch. He handed the finished product to me and for a heart-stopping second I almost dropped it, it was so unexpectedly heavy. "Stone, this thing weighs a ton! And pure gold, too!"

Oghren's deep-set eyes glittered almost as much as the crown, "I wouldn't mind a hat like that. Think he's got any extras?"

"You'd really wear _that_ on your _head_?" Alistair said skeptically. "You'd break your neck. No offense, but that's just about the tackiest thing I've ever seen. You might as well write 'I'm Expensive' on the side."

"You wouldn't understand," I sniffed. "It's _gold_. Oh shit, Oghren, look! He stuck a sodding star sapphire on top of the spiky thing in the middle!"

"I am sincerely glad the crown is to your satisfaction," came Caridin's steely rumble. "Give it to whomever you choose. I do not wish to hear their names. I have already lived far beyond my time. I have no place here."

I tore my eyes away from the magnificent crown. "Thank you."

"I have one more request of you."

"Name it."

He held out a hand and offered me a fistful of inscribed metal-sheathed stone rods. "Take what golems yet remain. Keep them away from those who would misuse them. Find a duty for them that will do justice and honor to the brave souls within these stone coffins."

My eyes widened as I accepted the control rods. Six of them... six golems. For once, I was speechless, and Alistair spoke for me. "It would be our honor."

"Atrast nal tunsha," Caridin said simply, and turned away, plodding out to the tip of the stone promontory. I followed, my heart in my mouth.

Then I watched as Paragon Caridin calmly walked off the edge of the stone and fell. The lava river swallowed him whole. A moment later, a few bubbles rose to the surface and burst, releasing clouds of black smoke.

"Atrast tunsha, Caridin," I whispered as I watched the bubbles rise. The tears that fell disappeared into steam long before they reached the lava's surface.

After a long silence, Oghren grunted, "What in sod-all are we still doin' here?"

"You're right." I sniffled and wiped my nose on my sleeve, then looked down at the rods in my hands. "How do these things work, do you think?"

"Try saying, 'Golems, walk!' in a deep, impressive voice," Alistair suggested, gesturing in a mystical sort of way.

"Golems, walk!" I commanded, holding up the rods. I'd been kidding, playing along with Alistair's joke, so I nearly fell backwards in surprise when all six golems took a ponderous step forward. "Ack! Stop!"

They stopped, glowing crystalline eyes swiveling towards me for more instructions.

"Maker, that's creepy," Alistair said.

"I can't stop thinking about the dead guys inside," I admitted. "Do you think their bones are still in there?"

Alistair shuddered. "Gee, thanks for that."

I managed to get the golems into a line, following us while we walked back to the Legion's outpost. The golems were very literal and had a tendency to do things like 'follow' me so closely they almost stepped on my heels if I wasn't specific enough. Morrigan fluttered down from the ceiling and perched on the lead golem's head, riding it with insolent ease.

When we reached the outpost, though, it was empty, the door unbarred. Scrawled in charcoal across the door was a note:

_Taking Shirah back to Orzammar. She's not dead yet. Catch us up if you can. I'm sorry, nugget. _

_Kardol_

"Well it's about time," I snorted, and we set off in pursuit of the Legion.

We caught up to them less than a day later. Laboring along with nearly every member still sore from the fight and Shirah unconscious, they hadn't exactly been making good time. Kardol's eyes just about fell out of his head when he saw the golems.

"Where in sod-all did you get those?" he demanded.

"Caridin," I answered, gesturing towards the rods that now hung in a sling I'd made from the sleeve of an old tunic. "You'll never guess what happened..."

A long story later, Kardol was holding one of the control rods and rolling it over and over between his fingers. "Stone's heart. I had no idea he was there. So, that Anvil... It was calling people, you say?"

I nodded. "Yeah. Or at least, it called Branka, and tried to call me at the last minute. Almost worked, too." I shivered a little.

"I felt it when you broke it, I think," he said, shifting uncomfortably where he sat on a boulder. "The calling was gone, all of a sudden. I just felt tired and... ashamed."

"You don't have to talk about it."

"Thanks. I'd rather not." He looked over to where Morrigan was checking on Shirah, who lay in a litter. "At least now we have the golems to carry her."

When we reached the end of our journey, we made an impressive spectacle at the great city gates. We were ushered quickly through the decontamination showers without having to wait in line behind the miners. The Legion of the Dead in their grim black armor, followed by the mighty golems, the mabari hound, the mystical witch, and Alistair in his armor, turned heads all the way through the city. Oghren drifted off from the group when we passed through the Common, and we continued on to the palace without him.

Once inside, we made a straight line for the Gray Warden suite in the palace and found Wynne in her room with a book; she was already putting it down and pulling on her more formal robe when we entered.

"Lay the poor dear down on the bed, there," she instructed.

"How did you know?" Kardol asked in surprise.

"Hush, don't bother me with silly questions!" Wynne shut down the Commander of the Legion of the Dead with a stern look and left him standing out in the hallway with the rest of us while she went to work on Shirah. Morrigan disappeared at once into her own room, and Rocky threw himself down on our bed for a nap.

"I, uh... I suppose I'll go to the Legion headquarters," Kardol said a bit dazedly. "Come on, boys. We have paperwork to fill out."

"What now?" Alistair asked. "Should we go straight to the Assembly?"

"No," I said grimly. "I want to talk to Bhelen."

Our arrival had not gone unnoticed, of course, and we only had to wait a minute or two before Bhelen himself came hurrying down the hallway. He stopped abruptly when he saw the golems, lined up against the walls of the Gray Warden common room where we were sitting. "By the Stone, Wardens! Does this mean you found the Anvil?" he exclaimed.

"We found it," I agreed. "But it's not going to be making any more golems. It's broken. We brought back the ones that were left."

Bhelen nodded, regaining some of his composure and continuing into the room. "That is disappointing, but better than a poke in the eye with a hot brand. And what about Branka? Did you find her?"

"She died in the search for the Anvil," Alistair told him, repeating the story we had agreed upon in advance. There was no need to poison Branka's memory, not now that the Anvil was destroyed and we didn't need her as a cautionary tale.

"We found Paragon Caridin, though," I added. "He was trapped in the body of a golem. We freed him, and in return he made a new crown for the King of Orzammar. He told us to give it to whoever we wished."

"Wonderful!" Bhelen cried, reaching out his hands. "Give it here. Let's see Paragon Caridin's last creation."

"In a minute," I said coldly.

Bhelen froze, then dropped his hands and seated himself on the sofa across from us, his face settling into stone. "If this is a betrayal, know that I will order this palace pulled down on you and your golems' heads before I let you place yourself on the throne."

It had genuinely not occurred to me that I could use the golems as a basis for a personal power grab, but of course Bhelen would think of it. Beside me, Alistair made a choked sound of disbelief, and I felt my nose wrinkle in supreme distaste at the thought of dealing with those backbiting deshyrs all day, every day. "Good grief, no. I'd sooner die. No, Bhelen, I just need to know something before I put you on the throne."

His throat shifted as he swallowed whatever he might have said in response to that. _Good_, I thought. _Let him consider just how much I can do for him. Let him remember to stay on my good side._ "Very well," he said.

"I met your sister, you know. In the Deep Roads. After you had her exiled. Care to explain?"

Bhelen's stony face flattened out into its default expression of jovial openness, and this time I recognized it as a mask for whatever powerful emotions were coursing underneath. He gazed at me steadily for a long, long moment before he sighed and looked away. "Truthfully, my friend, that did not go as planned."

"What, you expected her to be executed?" I scoffed. "Did the Assembly's mercy get in the way?"

"No!" he almost shouted, nostrils flaring and knuckles whitening as he clenched his fists. Rocky jumped down from the bed and came running in to see what the problem was, ears pricked forward. I gestured for him to go lie down, and the prince calmed himself with some effort while the dog reluctantly obeyed. "No. I expected her to be exonerated, for Trian's death to be blamed on assassins, perhaps, from a rival House."

"What? Really?" My brow furrowed in skepticism.

"Yes, really," he snapped. "If I took even an ounce of blame, I would have been executed and nobody would even have missed me. My father never cared about me, the Assembly never cared about me – I was neither the heir to the throne nor Daddy's favorite little girl. But Vesta was popular. Everyone loved _her_. She even said so herself, when she was arrested, she said, 'The Assembly loves me, give me my trial.'"

"So you thought you could murder your brother and blame your sister, and there would be no negative consequences whatsoever?" I scoffed.

"It would have worked," he insisted, "except for Harrowmont's scheming. Vesta and I never got on with him and he knew that if either of us took the throne, he'd be out on his fat gray arse. So he threw blame every which way, nearly bankrupted his House with illegal and deceptive bribes, and got the Assembly's favorite exiled_,_" his mouth twisted with disgust, "knowing that many of them would never support young, immature, unproven Prince Bhelen as King."

"Leaving an opening for himself," I finished, beginning to understand at least part of this awful mess. "But that still doesn't explain why you murdered your brother. You did murder your brother, didn't you."

"Not... personally." He looked away, but caught himself and turned back to us, eyes hard. "But I gave the order, and I don't regret it. You didn't know Trian. He would have made Orzammar our people's tomb! Vesta would have led us to new glory, fought the darkspawn like our ancestor, Aeducan himself!"

"But now, with her gone, you're trying to do it yourself." I sighed and rubbed at my forehead, feeling the beginnings of a real doozy of a headache.

"Look here, Wardens," Bhelen said, leaning forward intensely. "At this point, it's either Harrowmont or me. You've met Harrowmont. Do you honestly think he would be better for our people than me?"

"And, of course, you wouldn't mind being King one bit, would you," I said sourly. "Getting to stay in this palace, keeping your hands in the treasury."

"Fine. I'll admit, I like my rooms here. They're nice. Is that such a crime?"

I turned my eyes up at Alistair, who looked lost at sea. "Well? What do you think?"

He started, surprised that he was being asked his opinion. "Well _I_ don't know. I'm not a dwarf. All I can ask is, will he honor the treaty and help us against the Blight?"

"Yes! Yes, absolutely," Bhelen cut in. "We need allies on the surface, support in our own struggles. This is a perfect opportunity. But I can't do a thing until I'm crowned."

"Fine." I shrugged. "Call the Assembly. Let's do this."

* * *

"Bhelen wanted us to stick around for his coronation feast. Are you sure it's all right for us to skip out like this?" Alistair asked nervously as I pushed open the door to Tapster's.

"Nope. Now ask me if I care." I set a course through the raucous crowds towards a corner booth in the back. "I'm sick of nobles. I want some real food, and company that only tries to kill me for money, not politics. Zev and Leliana are meeting us here, anyway."

Right on cue, a smoothly accented voice came from behind my right ear. "Ah, how delightfully cultural. Alistair my friend, did you know dwarven ale isn't truly ale at all? And it's black! Marvelous!"

"Welcome back," Leliana said warmly. "How were the Deep Roads? Oh, Alistair, be careful not to step in that puddle of... whatever that is."

"Too late!" Zevran cried merrily while Alistair grimaced and tried to shake the unidentifiable fluid off his boot. The assassin slid into a booth and beckoned us to follow. "Come, let us sit down and we shall hear your adventures."

"I'll be right back, actually, I'm gonna go order some food," I said. "If we wait for service to come to us, we could be waiting until we all turn to stone."

I pushed through the patrons crowded around the bar, smirking to myself at finally being the _tall_ one again. I caught the bartender's eye over the head of a dwarf as short and thick as a boulder, and shouted an order for mushroom stew and kippers, plus a small flagon of ale for Alistair to taste – any more than that and he would probably burn out his innards.

I muscled another duster off a stool next to the bar by dint of my superior armament and stubbornness, and waited for the food while soaking up the noise and smells of Tapster's. It really was a dump, I realized, especially compared to places like the Gnawed Noble. It was crowded and dingy and soot-stained; however, it was still better than your average watering hole on the surface. Better materials, more artwork. Of course, that was only to be expected; most surface watering holes weren't a thousand years old.

My arms full with an overloaded tray, I wove back to our booth, but slowed my pace when I saw what was going on in my absence. Mardy, a noble hunter known less for her beauty than for her boldness, was perched on Alistair's knee and _giggling_. Alistair himself was sitting as though petrified, blushing brilliant red and doing his best to avoid looking at the two straining mountains of bosom Mardy wielded like a pair of loaded crossbows. Beside him, Zevran and Leliana were also bright red but, in their case, I suspected it was because they were desperately trying not to laugh.

More amused than jealous, I plunked the tray down on the table loudly enough to attract Mardy's attention. She turned and beamed at me. "Hi, sugar. Don't you travel with the _sweetest_ things!"

"I sure do," I said, grinning at Alistair's mortification. "But I could have sworn Rica said you were tight with Bhelen. What happened?"

A shadow crossed Mardy's broad face, pain that made her blink rapidly several times before she recovered her happy, flirty mask. "I had a baby girl, and Bhelen kicked me out when I insisted on keeping her. I'll try again. Thought maybe this man here would be more lucky, hmm, big guy?" She turned back to Alistair and leaned close to him, her breasts pressing against his chest as she purred, "You wanna give me a chance?"

"Umm, I-" Alistair stammered, his eyes pleading with me for rescue.

"Mardy, you're mining the wrong lode," I told her gently. "I'm sorry, but you'll have to look elsewhere."

She turned and glared at me, then slid off his lap, hissing, "And just where am I gonna find a dwarf who doesn't know I throw girls? It's common sodding knowledge by now. I'm sodding worthless in Orzammar."

"You'll find someone," I said, though I felt like a cold bitch for giving her such a useless platitude.

"Yeah, right," Mardy muttered, and disappeared into the crowd. I heard her voice further off, calling a greeting, and a moment later the masculine reply, "Sod off, slag."

"Wow, harsh," I said, startled.

"I am _so_ sorry," Alistair said. His blush was almost purple at this point and I struggled not to laugh at him.

"It's fine," I told him and slid into the booth beside him. "Zev, Leli, what have you two been up to?"

"Never mind that, what have _you_ been doing?" Leliana demanded, eyes bright. "I must know! You've been gone for three weeks!"

"Well," I began, but paused to take a bite of stewed mushroom, delighted at the agonizingly eager look on her face, before I continued with the story.

* * *

_If you're curious about how Latitia met Bhelen's sister, that story is told in "Lost and Found: Adventures in the Deep Roads," one of my other stories here on fanfiction dot net. It isn't necessary, though, it's just some extra backstory._

_Thank you all so much for bearing with me as I slog through the deep roads. There's tons of Alistair/Latitia in the next chapter, and thereafter the plot moves along at a good clip, no more vast dungeon crawls! Extra special thanks to my awesome reviewers, Shacary, Enaid Aderyn, mackillian, roxfox1962, Caleb Nova, Raven Jadewolfe, Cruellye, Arsinoe de Blassenville, and Nithu, and as always my hard-rockin beta, mille libri!_


	66. Family

_OMG I'm so slow right now. Sorry you guys! My deepest gratitude to everyone who reads, favorites, alerts, shares, and especially posts reviews – your feedback is important to me! I have the best readers ever :) And, of course, a bardic ode to mille libri, without whom this story would make a lot less sense._

* * *

Getting the dwarven nobles to mobilize their armies turned out to be almost as difficult as getting them to pick a king. Alistair and I listened in disbelief to Vartag Gavorn, Bhelen's Second, as he described some of the difficulties he faced in organizing their march.

"What do you mean, two weeks?" I demanded of him.

"At the outside," he hedged. "It might be possible to start in ten days."

"That's not sodding fast enough." I leaned forward and planted my hands on his desk, ignoring the letters and troop manifests scattered over it. "For all we know, the Blight has swallowed the entire nation of Ferelden while we were trudging around in the Deep Roads solving your problems. Two weeks of bickering over who gets to walk next to who might make the difference between fighting with many allies a long way from our city, and fighting it _alone_ right on our doorstep. It's been a long time since an Archdemon tested Orzammar's Great Gates. I don't fancy gambling our _entire nation_ on them, do you?"

His face hardened. "I see your point. I'll do what I can, Wardens, but I'm no miracle worker. Some of the Houses are dragging their feet in the hopes of overthrowing the others once their armies are away, which means even previously cooperative Houses are now afraid to leave."

"It's been too long since the last Blight," Alistair said, shaking his head. "Nobody remembers how bad it was. Ferelden broke out in civil bloody war, for Andraste's sake!"

"And nobody remembers how much they owe the Gray Wardens," I added grimly. "Vartag, do what you can to prod them along. I shouldn't come, but Alistair can go with you and loom menacingly."

"What? Prod noble arse all by myself?" Alistair squawked.

I shrugged and tried not to curl my lip just thinking about the noble Houses. "Most of them, if a brand tells them to do something, they'll feel honor-bound _not_ to do it, Gray Warden or no. And the ex-Harrowmont supporters won't exactly be pleased to see me. You, at least, we were able to keep mostly out of the political public eye."

So he went, layered in all the shiny stuff we could find, including a borrowed brocade tunic and a plume. I thought he looked horrendously tacky, but Alistair clearly thought himself quite fine and, more importantly, Vartag and Rica agreed that he was impressive. Apparently, hanging out with nobles eventually dulls one's color vision to the point that scarlet and cobalt stripes look good.

While he and Vartag were "prodding arse," I finally got to spend some time with Rica and her baby boy. Little Endrin looked pretty much like every other baby. He was cute and all, but I found myself thinking about the pile of tiny skeletons outside the city, abandoned for being the wrong gender. What was so special about him, that _he_ lived in a palace while all those casteless babies had been left to die?

"Rica," I said slowly over dinner, "did you hear about Mardy?"

Her pretty face clouded. "I did. I – I wanted to try to convince Bhelen to keep her, but..."

"You have to think of Endrin first, and she's competition," I finished for her.

"I did suggest that he give her a stipend," she hurried to add. "I think she's so brave for keeping her baby girl. It must be so hard."

I swallowed a bite of mushroom loaf. "Mam!"

"Mama? What about her?"

"She kept us _both_. No stipend, either." Our eyes met over the laden table. "Now that's brave."

It was easy, as a child, to see only that our mother had no time for us, that she was always out, that despite her efforts the table was often bare. To remember the many, many times she said, "Not now, I'm too tired," and forget the far fewer moments when she laughed. Later, it was easier to condemn her drinking than to understand it was the last refuge of a broken-down woman, and easier still to write her off than to try to help. Or at least, it had been for me. Rica had always been more responsible. While I had gotten myself exiled, _she_ had paid any price to get herself _and_ Mam a home in the palace.

"I had hoped she would be happier here," Rica said, as though following my thoughts. "But all she cares about is the quality of the wine."

"I should visit her," I said, rising. "I've been putting it off long enough. Show me where she is?"

"Usually by this time of night she's conked out in her bed."

Rica led me to a small (by palace standards) room attached to her own. The sour smell emanating from it brought with it a surprising flood of nostalgia, though not entirely the good kind. I made a huge racket opening the door, sending empty liquor bottles clattering over the stone tiles, but the figure slumped over the table inside didn't react.

I just stood and looked at her for a moment. Like Rica had said, Mam hadn't changed; aside from the quality of her dress, the fineness of the fabric evident despite being rumpled and stained, the picture she made was achingly familiar. Were the table more scarred, the floor rough-hewn, I could almost imagine she was in our old apartment. A loud snore broke the moment, and after a second's thought, I pulled a blanket off her bed to drape around her shoulders.

"'M... I'm good f'r another," she mumbled, waving one hand vaguely and knocking over a glass bottle. A few drops of dark liquid spattered across the marble tabletop. "Another."

"No, Mam," I told her quietly. "It's time to sleep."

She snuffled a little in her drunken slumber, but was otherwise unresponsive as I left the room, closing the door behind me.

"That's probably just as well," Rica said with a sad smile.

"Yeah," I sighed. "If she'd been more awake, she'd just have shouted at me for being a horrible disappointment, and now a cloudhead, too."

"Who would?" Alistair's indignant voice preceded him into Rica's room.

"It doesn't matter," I said with finality. "How did things go with Vartag?"

"Ugh." He shuddered. "Please, don't make me do that again."

"Aww, were the big bad dwarven nobles scary?" I teased. "Next time we'll find someone shorter for you to bully, like maybe a nug."

"They might be short, but they make up for it with their towering arrogance." Alistair grimaced and tugged at the polished gorget that protected his throat. "I'm hot, I'm thirsty, and I think I have half a pound of stone dust stuck to the back of my neck. Can we talk about it while I change out of this armor? And take a bath?"

"Sure." I followed him out of the room, smiling back over my shoulder at Rica. "I'll see you tomorrow."

The Warden suite was quiet at the moment; Wynne had moved with Shirah to the Legion of the Dead's Orzammar organizational headquarters, Zev and Leliana were off causing trouble, and Morrigan had not come out of her room since we got back. We went to our own room and I began running a bath, then started helping Alistair out of his heavy plate armor.

"I feel all important." He grinned as he held out his arms so I could get at the buckles across his ribs. "I have a squire. A cute one, too."

I pulled off his breastplate and tossed it on the bed. "I will admit it's refreshing to be stripping a live body instead of a corpse."

"Aww, way to be morbid," he complained, trying not to laugh.

"You won't be laughing when you wake up and find out I've sold all your stuff out of reflex."

"What? And make me fight the Archdemon naked? You wouldn't." My breath caught and I met his gaze. At first bright and teasing, his eyes darkened slightly at something he saw in my own. "Or would you?"

I flushed and looked back at my hands. "It's, um, a powerful mental image, I'll give you that. Uh... Vartag? The army?"

"Right." He sighed. "I suppose we should get that out of the way. Vartag had the bright idea of sending some of his clerks with us, instead of having us wait for the whole army to be ready. He said that the clerks can arrange for supply depots and camps to be prepared in advance, so the army can travel much, much faster."

"I suppose, if they wait until the Blight is banging on our door, at least then the army won't have to march very far."

"There's always a silver lining, the Chantry says."

"Always?" I scoffed. "And if the Archdemon succeeds in blighting the entire world? What then?" I shucked off the last piece of plate and he sat on the edge of the bed to untie his boots.

"Then we won't have to put on formalwear ever again," he grunted as he pulled his borrowed tunic over his head.

"Are you gonna whine all night, or are you gonna get naked and take your bath already?" When I realized his ears were turning pink I changed my expression to a lascivious leer somewhere between Oghren and Zevran. "Yeah, that's right, baby, take it _alllll_ off."

He spluttered with embarrassed laughter and threw his shirt at my head. By the time I had disentangled myself from the garment, which seemed as big as a sodding tent, Alistair was in the tub and working his hair into a vigorous lather. I watched him for a few moments, fondness warming my belly, before I went to dig out our map. We spent the next half-hour discussing where we would suggest the dwarven army camps be placed, me sitting on a chair far enough away to keep the map safe from splashes, until he got out and grabbed a thick towel off the nearby rack.

"Are you hungry, or did you guys eat out?" I asked, and tried not to stare too blatantly. Or to drool too much.

"Every single House fed me," he groaned through the fluffy fabric of the towel, currently draped over his head as he rubbed at his hair. "They all had their own special family recipe for nug sausages, which they claimed was the very best nug sausage in the whole bloody city, and they were sure a Gray Warden would just _love_ to try it. I got the impression that if I didn't agree, I'd be axed off at the knees. One recipe had hot chili peppers in it. I nearly burned off my tongue! Where did they get chilis underground?"

"Oh, those weren't chilis," I said.

"What were they, then?"

"You probably don't want to know."

"You're probably right, considering they made me eat two." He finished drying off and wrapped the towel around his waist, then sat on the edge of the bed. He gave me a strange, sidelong look and picked up his belt pack from the floor. "I got you something."

"You did?" I hopped up on the bed to look over his shoulder, leaning my cheek against his neck, which was warm and smelled of soap. "What for? Is it Satinalia already?"

"No, it's..."

He pulled a small packet of folded paper out of his pack and hesitated, fingering it gently in his warrior's hands. It clinked, and I perked up a little more, pressing against his broad back in an effort to see what he was holding. Metal? Oooh!

He continued, "I wasn't going to give you this for a while, I mean, we don't... I can't... Well, I can't really promise you anything, not yet. There's the Blight, and the throne, and-"

"I know," I said impatiently. "I promise I won't try to make you marry me or anything. I know better than to try."

He gave me another strange look and mutely handed the packet back to me. I sat back and tore it open, and he shifted around on the bed so he could see my reaction without getting a crick in his neck. I was expecting jewelry of some sort, maybe rough gems or colorful cut glass, something big and gaudy like what the noble hunters collected from their patrons and wore to show off their favor. I was wrong – or at least not entirely right.

The simple gold ring was not gaudy at all.

"I don't understand," I said after a long moment.

"You don't like it?" His voice was tense, tight with many undercurrents.

"It's beautiful," I said, which was true. Can't argue with gold, it's classic for a reason. "But I don't understand why you would give something like this to... someone like me."

"That's why I didn't think it could wait."

Startled, I looked up at him for explanation. He obliged even though he was blushing and stumbling to put thoughts into words.

"You told me some of what life is like here, for women. For people in Dust Town. But being here, seeing your sister and how much she has to sacrifice just to stay in Bhelen's bed, and poor little Mardy, I just-" He stopped, then blurted, "I couldn't bear it if you thought I would do that to you. Ever."

"You gave me a ring because you felt sorry for Mardy?" I said blankly. I felt like I was being impossibly dense but I couldn't help it.

"No, I – arrg." He passed a hand over his face, groping for phrases. "Bhelen threw her away like she was garbage. And you and Rica talk about him like he's this really generous guy, like she should be _grateful_ to him! Latitia, you are _not_ garbage to me. You're worth so much more than that. Even if we can't – if something happens, and – I needed you to know that I _wanted_ to do right by you."

"Aw," I whispered. The image of the ring in my hands blurred and I realized I was crying. "Aw, Alistair, you sweet, clueless bastard."

"Uh, thank you?"

"No, thank _you_." I leaned over and pressed my face into his shoulder.

Strong arms pulled me snug against him. "So... you like it?" he asked tentatively.

"I love it." A thought occurred to me. "But I can't wear it most of the time, you know, rings are dangerous to wear in a fight. They get snagged on things even through gloves."

"Ah! I thought of that," he said excitedly, pulling away to retrieve his pack from the floor and digging around it in again. "Here we go – I went back to the smith, Turana, and asked him to suggest something. He gave me this chain, here. Instead of going through the middle of the ring, it clips onto the sides, so it lies flat against your chest under your armor."

"Put it on me," I ordered, holding out the ring.

"As you command."

He brushed my hair away from my neck, the light touch making me shiver even as I made a mental note that my hair was getting too long. A second or two of fumbling with the clasp, and I felt the rich weight of the gold fall against my chest.

The metal was cold at first, but warmed quickly. I had never worn my own jewelry before. I decided I liked it. Or maybe I liked how I had gotten it, or possibly I liked the way his hands slid over my shoulders and down to encircle my waist, or how solid and strong and frankly sexy his body felt against my back as he drew me against him and nuzzled my cheek.

"I love you," he murmured.

I tried not to stiffen, I really did. Because I didn't want to hurt him, I tried not to show how hard it was to say, "I love you, too," but it really was shockingly difficult and it came out all garbled.

"What?" he asked, pulling away a little.

"I love you, too." It was a little easier the second time, so I tried it again, even though I felt like I was daring the universe. "I love you."

He went very still, and then I felt his lips against my neck, curved into a wide smile. "Was that so hard?"

"Yeah, actually it was," I pretended to grumble, but I was smiling, too – grinning, really, a big silly girlish grin that I was glad nobody else would see. My fingers went to the smooth circle of gold at my throat. In the past months, we'd seen more evil than even a duster like me had known existed; we faced an impossible foe with only the most reluctant of allies; each day might be the day we were parted forever, whether by politics or by violent death. Such a tiny thing, a little golden spark given with more caveats than a dwarven trade contract, should be swallowed up in that darkness. Instead, it blazed like a torch.

But then, hope is a stubborn little thing.

"Then I appreciate the effort," Alistair said, and planted a wet kiss on my cheek. "In fact... would you allow me to show just how much I appreciate it?"

"What did you have in mind?" I clamped down hard on the part of me that was instantly wary, reminding myself that this was Alistair, who... No, no more evading it, even in the silence of my heart: Alistair, who I loved.

"Well," he drawled, "for starters, I might undress you. I am capable of undoing a knot. In fact, I once untangled a Redcliffe fisherman's net in three minutes flat."

I giggled, realizing for the first time that I did, in fact, always insist on undressing myself. "Okay."

"Granted, I untangled the net with the help of a very big pair of scissors. The fisherman wasn't too happy." His hands tugged on the ties at the collar of my tunic, loosening it enough to pull over my head. "There, I think this is going rather well. And _after_ I manage this feat, I have something I'd like to try."

"Y-you do?" I was torn between being grateful that he didn't linger over my body as he undressed me, and rather wishing he would.

"Mm-hmm." He bent down and wrapped one arm around my waist, lifting me slightly to pull off my trousers and grinning at my shriek of laughter when his fingers tickled my ribs. "Zevran cornered me in the lavatory when we were at Tapster's and filled in some gaps in my education. He was very... descriptive. And determined. Covering my ears and singing hymns did nothing to discourage him."

"Is that why you were gone so long? I was afraid you'd been mugged." I tried to imagine what Zevran might know that Alistair didn't, and ran out of room in my brain.

"He wouldn't let me leave until I promised to listen."

"But..." My imagination scrambled and presented a _lot_ of possibilities that I wasn't ready for. "But Alistair, I don't – I don't like hands on me-"

"I know." He covered my mouth with a long, languorous kiss, and hot damn but he was getting really good at that. Then he pulled back and met my gaze, his own hazel eyes sparkling. "I don't have to use my hands."


	67. Party Composition

_OMM it has been a long time since the last update. I got some sort of demon virus that would not go away last June. The doctor's verdict was "probably some sort of mono" - gee, thanks, modern medical science. The ability to write was pretty much the last function to come back online. It's good to be back! Without further ado:_

* * *

"OooOOoooh," Leliana exclaimed the following morning, leaping up and rushing over to me. Rica and Zevran were left behind her at the breakfast table. "Where did you get _that_? So elegant! So classic! May I?"

"Sure." I grinned and tilted my chin up to let Leliana touch my shiny new ring where it nestled in the hollow of my throat, suspended by the very practical chain Alistair had given me to keep it on since I didn't often wear jewelry on my hands.

"So heavy! Solid gold?"

I nodded and guided her fingers to the stamped insignia on its inner surface. "Feel that? It's-"

"House Turana's guarantee of purity," she exclaimed. "Why, you cannot hope for a more trustworthy source!"

At first I was surprised that she knew – but then, Leliana had been waiting for us here in Orzammar for three weeks while we tromped around in the Deep Roads; I supposed that, if she couldn't draw up a complete flowchart of current House power dynamics after that long, then she wouldn't be much of a Bard. Behind me, Alistair entered the dining room, stifling a yawn.

"Excellent taste, my unexpectedly suave friend," Zevran said to him with a smirk.

Rica gasped, hands covering her mouth, eyes as wide as saucers as she looked from me to my fellow Warden. "Oh, Alistair! Oh, _Latitia_! Is – is that what I think it is? Oh, oh, oh! How did it happen? Did he go down on one knee?"

I squirmed uncomfortably. I didn't expect Alistair to deny it or act ashamed now that we were in public, but even so, I avoided looking at him and told her, "We aren't, well, you know. Not really. I mean, we have to deal with the Blight first, and then there's the whole King... thing."

Leliana laid a hand on her brow and sighed dramatically, "Two lovers, their futures unknown, strive nonetheless to-"

"All right, that's enough of that," I cut her off mid-rhapsodization, seating myself beside Rica, who gave my hand a squeeze of support. Alistair sidled into the chair on my other side. He was blushing. "Get packed, everyone. We're leaving tomorrow."

Zevran groaned his appreciation. "It is definitely about time. My tan is beginning to fade shamefully. Another few weeks down here and I run the risk of becoming," he shuddered, "_pasty_."

"Where are the mages?"Alistair asked, nodding towards the two empty places.

"Wynne is checking on the wounded Legionnaire," Leliana explained. "She says she should recover fully in time. Morrigan, on the other hand, has not left her room since you returned."

I frowned as I piled my plate with algae biscuits and ladled them with a generous amount of gravy. The rest of the breakfast passed in warm conversation, most people content enough to ignore the prickly swamp witch, but I remembered how, by the end of our dark journey, she had begun to cling to her spider form – or maybe it had been the other way around. I owed her too much to neglect her, especially since I'd been the one to drag her into the deeps. I worried that she was staying away in order to hide how badly being in the Deep Roads had hurt her. She had come because I asked it of her, she had saved our arses many times over, and I knew a simple 'thank you' wouldn't go very far to paying off that debt.

As though she had heard me thinking about her, or maybe just heard the clinking of flatware on porcelain, Morrigan's door opened and she stalked into the room. The palace servants had laundered her feral robes and her magnificent hair was clean and freshly combed into its usual updo; the woman beneath the hair and clothing was pale even by her own standards. She began to gather up some food to take back to her own room and as she bent over the table, her gaze slid over us without making eye contact, only to be caught by the new gold at my throat. She paused and looked for long enough that she gave me an idea. I'd been planning to invite Leliana on my next errand, as a reliable negotiator and lover of finery, but it was so hard to figure out what Morrigan _wanted_ that I shouldn't ignore the hint she had just given me.

"Morrigan – wait a sec. I'm going to the gems and antiquities exchange after breakfast to sell some loot. They won't deal directly with dusters, so I need a proxy. You wanna put on your jewelry and pretend to be a fancy rich shopper? I'll give you a cut."

It might have been tacky to offer her money, but I feared she would sniff and tell me to find another tool if I didn't offer further incentive, and besides, I was pretty sure she hadn't ever been given money of her own, and in my experience that tended to make a person appreciate the freedom of coins far beyond their actual cash value.

She hesitated; then she nodded once and turned away briskly. "I shall assist you once I have finished my meal."

Morrigan made me wait long enough to thoroughly establish that I was waiting for her to graciously accompany me and she was definitely coming because she felt like it and not because I was in any way her boss. That was fine by me. I had no desire for a dominance face-off with a shape-shifting swamp witch.

"What do you have to sell at a gems and antiquities exchange?" Alistair asked as he shuffled the deck of cards. Leliana and Zevran watched, smiling faintly as he walked into the trap of playing card games with them. "And why aren't I invited?"

"I didn't mean to not invite you, you can come if you want. I just think you'd be bored," I said. "Kardol gave me some great stuff he found in the Deep Roads, worth a small fortune. He said," I imitated his deep voice as well as my skinny chest could manage, "'What good is gold to a dead man? Go turn it into steel and use it to kill yourself an archdemon.'"

"That was nice of him," Alistair said, managing to express just how much of an understatement that was with a lift of his eyebrows.

"Yeah, well, he still got the better of the deal," I said. "I gave him the control rods for the golems."

"You did what?" He sat up straight, shocked. "But – but we could have used them against the Blight!"

I looked down at my boots, unhappy to have to make the difficult decision, but I had thought it through and I wasn't going to change my mind. "Bhelen and Vartag are stripping the Houses dry to send us the biggest army Orzammar has fielded in generations. It's a huge gamble and if we're wrong, if the archdemon decides to lay siege to Orzammar while we're gone, the thaig could be lost. All our noncombatants, women and children, all the artisans and Shapers, dead because we took away their defenders. It would be more than simple loss of life. The dwarva as we are now would be destroyed."

Alistair opened his mouth as though to argue, but no words came out. He glanced around the room and I knew he was thinking about this palace room filled with darkspawn filth, just as Bownammar had been. "I... guess I see your point. And your sister is here. We can't leave her and her baby unprotected."

"Kardol has been defending this city for almost a decade," I said. "He's survived longer than any other Legionnaire in living memory, and he knows what he's doing. If the darkspawn come here, he'll make those golems sell their lives so dearly, the thaig might actually stand a chance."

"And of course you could not have given the golems to the Aeducan house," Leliana mused.

Zevran agreed. "It would create an untenable power imbalance. King Bhelen could easily become a tyrant, with such weapons at his disposal."

"I think you did the right thing," Leliana said stoutly. "Though I suspect the King would disagree."

"Of course he would," I said. "And for that matter so would Wynne. I'd appreciate it if you kept this fact to yourselves until we're back on the surface. If Wynne asks, tell her the truth, but if she doesn't ask, then what she doesn't know won't hurt her."

Alistair looked unhappy at having to hide such important information, but he nodded. "The dwarves are your people. If you think they need the golems, I'll stand by your decision – though I was looking forward to watching golems play tenpins with genlock heads."

I smiled at him and squeezed his shoulder, grateful for his support, and glad too that Leliana and Zevran agreed. "Thank you, all of you. So, to return to the original topic, do you want to come shopping with us or stay here and let Zev and Leli beat you at poker?"

"I suppose I'll stay here. Vartag said he'd come by later and take me to the training rings to spar."

"Excellent," said Zevran. "Shall I deal the cards?"

"I'm not that dumb," Alistair said flatly. "I'll shuffle, _and_ I'll deal."

When Morrigan finally returned, she was fully decked out in every shiny or colorful thing she owned and her hair adorned with the bright blue feather from Denerim, something that was sure to impress the fashionable ladies shopping at the gem exchange. She strode directly for the door in a businesslike way and I had to grab my satchel and run to catch up.

"Where is this exchange?" she asked when I caught up. "And what is it exactly that you require of me?"

"Off the Commons in the merchant quarter. You don't have to do anything but give the guy the stuff and take a payment in return. Usually I'd sell to a middleman like Bodahn, but they pay a fraction of the real value so they can take their own cut of profit when they resell it," I explained.

We reached the gilded door of the gem exchange and Morrigan swept in like a queen. I scurried along in her wake and was completely ignored – I was small, scruffy and carrying a bag, therefore I must be merely a servant and not worthy of notice by the wealthy prospectors, nobles and merchants who sat at tables to haggle out deals, or wandered through the long hall and simply shopped. Shafts of light shone through a natural quartz crystal that hung from the ceiling, and more crystals fringed the walls of the natural cavern. Display stands and merchant desks were built in among the crystals.

Our sale went well; prices were a little depressed because of the recent increased ease of passage in the Roads since the darkspawn had moved to the surface, but Kardol's treasure still fetched a lot of gold. The merchant we dealt with clearly intended to start with a lowball offer, but one look at Morrigan's cool, unfriendly gaze made him decide not to try to fleece the tourists today, and we left his table with a nice heavy purse.

"We'll have to talk to Alistair about how far this will go on the surface, but at least we can buy new equipment..." I stopped talking when I noticed Morrigan wasn't listening. We were making our meandering way towards the door, with many stops to examine this booth or that display case, and something seemed to have caught her attention.

The glass counter she was staring at was full of geodes; the stone eggs were popular decorations in almost every dwarven home. I had seen a particularly nice one in Bhelen's chambers, and another in Harrowmont's living room. Of course, we Broscas had never had anything of the sort, since if I got my hands on anything shiny I converted it into gold as quickly as possible, and from there into food or rent.

Morrigan's gaze was locked on a geode lined with metallic altaite crystals, her beautiful face reflecting in shades of pale gold from a wide, flat facet right in the middle. I peered at it and said, "You could use that one as a mirror, it's so shiny."

"Indeed," she said absently. Her brows drew together as if in deep thought.

I craned my neck to check the price tag. It wasn't obscene; the geode was small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, and not a particularly fashionable mineral. It was special not because it was flamboyant but because it was perfect in its imperfection, the irregular encrustation of translucent, lustrous golden crystals framing the mirror-smooth center facet in an intriguingly organic pattern, one designed by the Stone itself.

"Do you like it?" I asked her.

She didn't speak at first, but just as I thought she wasn't going to answer me, she said, "It reminds me of another beautiful thing. One that was never properly mine and that Flemeth destroyed almost at once."

She stopped and looked startled at herself for having spoken at all. I could feel her eyes flick to me anxiously to check if I were about to strike at the momentary vulnerability; I kept my own eyes on the geode and pressed my lips together, thinking of the old witch's plans for Morrigan herself. "Flemeth seems to have a pattern of destroying beautiful things."

She caught her breath; then it all came out in a rush, how Morrigan as a girl had longed to join a fancy lady in her fancy coach and how she had stolen a golden mirror, cradled it to her chest as a way to be closer to that dream. How Flemeth had coldly reminded her of the reality of her situation and destroyed the mirror to make her point. When Morrigan was done speaking, her breast heaved, belying the calm and matter-of-fact way in which she'd told the tale.

I nodded and kept my gaze on the geodes because I felt sure she'd die of embarrassment if I happened to see a tear in her eye or some other hint of her old pain. "I never had any dreams of being beautiful," I said with a gesture that took in my utter lack of figure, "but I know how it feels to wish I'd been born to a different society. I wished I could be... I guess 'well-groomed' is the best word for it. Manicured and coiffed and perfumed and moisturized, instead of sweaty and calloused from working and always covered in dust and ash from the smog coming off the lava flows. I wanted to _smell_ good."

That pulled a surprised laugh out of her and I glanced up and gave her a grin. "Yeah, I know. I shouldn't have picked a career involving leather armor if I wanted to smell like anything other than sweat."

"At least you do not wear metal armor, as Alistair does," Morrigan noted. "Then you should smell of rust, as well."

"It's the salt on your skin, no matter how often you polish your mail it always has a little rust on it," I said, trying not to sound defensive. I thought a man in armor smelled _manly_, though I did have to admit it could get a little ripe on a long journey. I gestured toward the little mirror geode. "You know, you could buy that pretty thing. I'm giving you gold for your help, and Flemeth isn't here to tell you what to do with it."

Her eyes snapped to the item in question and longing passed over her face, but that was followed by a more reserved and calculating expression. "I do not believe I will," she said at length, with a tiny hint of wistfulness. "Now that I have money of my own I believe I shall save it for future need. 'Tis good to be able to provide for myself in an emergency."

Good grief, the curse of practicality. Rica never would buy anything for herself, either. If she wanted a new ribbon for her hair, I had to buy it for her as a gift, or put up with her yearning towards the ribbon stall every time we went to the Common. I huffed out a breath and beckoned the gem merchant over, pointing out which geode I wanted him to take out of the locked case for me. He pretended not to see me at first but changed his mind when I plunked down the coins.

"What are you doing?" Morrigan asked, genuinely confused.

"I'm buying it for you."

"Why?"

"Because I want to." I realized that was not a very complete answer and remembered how a basic 'thank you' had been completely alien to her, and went on to elaborate, "Because you like it, and I want to thank you for helping us, and also because you're my friend and it would make me happy to give you something you like. And, it's appropriate. This mirror wasn't made by hands, but by the Stone. It's far stronger and its beauty is more natural than any fancy toy. Like you."

The merchant placed the geode in a tissue-lined box and gave it to me, and I presented it to Morrigan with great ceremony and a little bow. "A gift for you, my lady witch," I said, hoping to make her scoff at my silliness rather than feel embarrassed or awkward.

I think it worked because she dropped a mocking curtsy and – this was the important bit – accepted the box. "'Tis a fine gift," she said grandly. "Thank you." She cradled the little box close to her stomach as we left.

We were almost to the elevator when when a pile of garbage in a nearby alley let out a grunt and heaved itself to its feet. I almost jumped right out of my boots and Morrigan skittered several steps sideways.

"Wuh – Warden," grunted the garbage pile. It turned out to be Oghren, looking much the worse for his time in the city. As far as I could tell, he hadn't bathed, changed, brushed his hair or even re-braided his beard, but he'd definitely found plenty of time to drink. He smelled so strongly of cheap black ale that I felt light-headed and wondered if I could get drunk just standing near him. Morrigan's nose twitched with revulsion and she set off briskly for the elevator, disappearing into it and away from the noxious fumes.

"Oghren," I returned the greeting warily and shifted back a step to keep him just out of arm's reach. I didn't know him well enough to know if he liked to hit people when he was drunk.

"Been looking for ya." He squinted at me blearily and put a hand out to balance himself.

I flinched at the sudden movement of his hand, then felt my cheeks heat, even though he didn't seem to have noticed. Because I was embarrassed, I got sarcastic. "What, in an alley? Or in the bottom of every bottle in Tapsters?"

Oghren's face fell, what little of it I could see between the eyebrows and the beard. He looked lost. "I jus' went to have one drink, ya know, take the edge off... I had to go back to our – to Branka's house and get her will for the damned Shaper. The whole house so damned empty. An' after that, I dunno, I just... I was gonna have a drink and then come find you. I think that was... I dunno. What day is it?"

Branka's house. He'd had to lie to the Shaper, to tell him that every member of Oghren's family _hadn't_ been killed – or worse – by their Paragon but had instead died in noble service of Orzammar. I thought about the brash warrior standing alone in the once-busy house and maybe thinking about the wife he had left in a pool of her own blood. Maybe remembering the feel of skin and cartilage breaking beneath the blade of his axe.

"We should have gone with you," I said. "I'm sorry."

"Pfeh." He curled his lip, scorning my pity. "Weren't your business, was it?"

"No. I guess not."

He took a breath and seemed to come to himself a bit. "Anyway, I, uh..." He rummaged around in a pocket with one huge, calloused paw. "I owe ya for the axe. Sorry. The guard took it off me before I'd gone ten steps. Forgot to give it back to ya before I left."

He held out some random coinage, and I had no idea if it accurately represented what Alistair had paid for the weapon, but I took it anyway because I didn't know what else to do. After a moment I asked, "Was that it?"

He hesitated. "Uh... yeah, I guess."

I had a feeling that wasn't true, so I watched him carefully when I asked, "What are you going to do now?"

"Drink." The single word held more hopelessness than an entire litany.

"That's it?"

He scowled and turned his head away. "What else can I do? I'm only good at one thing, Warden, and that's fightin' and killin'. And I ain't allowed to do that anymore. Not in Orzammar."

"Come with us."

The words were out before I had time to lose my nerve. For a moment we just stared at each other, equally shocked at the open invitation.

But Oghren was a true warrior, a mighty weapon honed by his caste's constant training, and to let him rot in the alley behind Tapster's was a pitiful waste. Orzammar had caught me in its jaws once, just as it had trapped Oghren, and Duncan had seen something in me that he thought was worth saving. Maybe it was my turn to pass it along. I was remembering Mam, too. It seemed at that moment our black ale was a creeping disease that claimed men and women too broken to protect themselves.

"An' be a Warden?" he said finally.

I couldn't tell if he hoped for a yes or a no, but it didn't matter – we couldn't make any new Wardens until we could contact the rest of the order. "No. We can't recruit anyone right now. But we need men who can kill darkspawn."

"I can do that," he grunted.

"All right then."

"All right."

I looked him over for a moment, realizing I didn't know what to do with him until we left Orzammar. I couldn't take him into the palace with me, not when he was stumbling drunk and stinking like an alcoholic cesspool, but I didn't like to think of sending him back to his dead wife's house to wait, alone. Finally I told him, "I want you to get a room upstairs at the Smelting Pot. Sleep off the booze and take a shower. Come to the palace and ask for the Wardens when you're presentable."

"Smeltin' Pot's a fruity bunch of nobs-"

"Oghren, we need to set one thing in stone before you join us," I cut him off sharply. "This is Gray Warden business. You're going to take orders from Alistair, and you're going to take them from me, too, and you sodding well better do as I say or you can stay here and turn into dust."

He actually looked a little relieved; something tight and strained inside him relaxed almost imperceptibly. "Got it. You're the boss." And with that he turned and made his unsteady way towards the Smelting Pot Inn.

* * *

"Stone's teeth but I picked a bad day for a hangover," Oghren moaned. He pressed one mailed fist against his eyes, shielding them from the slit of daylight shining through Orzammar's surface gates. "Is it always so sodding bright?"

I gave him a commiserating look. "Now you see why I told everyone to wear welding helmets with eyeshields."

I glanced beside me to Alistair and the rest of our friends, their packs over their shoulders and ready to go, and then behind me at the score of sturdy dwarven engineers and army quartermasters who had been ordered by their new King to leave their ancestral home and walk on the sun-blasted surface, to pave the way for our armies to march. There was a hurried rustle of movement as visors were lowered, their green glass shielding sensitive eyes from the overwhelming light. I pulled my own hat down lower, wincing in anticipation of leaving the familiar dull warm glow of the lava behind. Thinking of that, I pulled my cloak tighter around my body for protection against the cold mountain wind. My motion was mimicked by the other dwarves around me.

Honestly, I was a little worried about the soldiers to come later. In going over the supply lists with Vartag, we'd discovered that Orzammar simply did not have enough wool or fur to keep all her soldiers warm. Men were going to have to share tents and blankets at night, and hope Ferelden's treacherous weather didn't pick this year for an extra early winter. The quartermasters coming with me would trade for what they could and arrange supply dumps and campsites to keep the army moving... and we'd just have to brace ourselves for the inevitable disease that always plagues an army on the march in the cold and damp.

"Ready, dwarva?" I called out. There was a round of shaky nods. "Then let's go. You're going to be just fine. The Stone is still beneath our feet, and we're still dwarva – if humans and elves can actually _live_ on the surface, then it should be a piece of cake for the people of Stone!"

"Quit talkin' about goin' and _go_," Oghren said, and gave the stone gates a massive shove.

"Oh, by the way," I added, "remember not to look at the sun or you might go blind."

"Not helping," Oghren muttered.

So it was that I left Orzammar for the _second_ time, with a full pack on my back, loyal friends at my side and a dwarven army soon to follow. All in all, it was a pretty sodding big improvement over my last, ignominious exit.

* * *

_A/N – the exact nature of Morrigan's gift is thanks to the brilliant Enaid Aderyn. Thanks, Enaid Aderyn! Also thanks to the very patient and encouraging mille libri for beta help and Rock Band vocals, and thank you, too, fabulous reader, for coming back to my story even after such a long wait. You're the best :)_


	68. Plotting in Redcliffe

_A/N: At the risk of spoilers, I want to remind everyone that Latitia is a new immigrant to Ferelden. She knows nothing about Loghain except what Alistair has told her and what she has observed in recent days, which is hardly a balanced and objective assessment. Personally, I think Loghain is a great character, largely due to Arsinoe de Blassenville's excellently nuanced portrayal of him in her epics, but Latitia's opinion is the one that matters here, not mine._

_Extra special thanks to the inestimable mille libri for bearing with me flailing through multiple revisions of this chapter!_

* * *

I had meant for us to leave right before sunset, so my fellow dwarva wouldn't have to be exposed to the sun for too long, but Alistair had argued that we should get as far down the mountain as possible before nightfall and make camp on one of the merchant rest stops. As it turned out, I was glad he did.

"It's colder than a noble's heart out here," I grumbled to nobody in particular, clutching my cloak around me with one hand and holding onto my hood with the other. Rocky looked up at me in commiseration, snow crusting his nose. An especially spiteful gust of wind snatched the hood out of my numb fingers and blew ice crystals into my face like a frozen fist. "Aack! Oh, that is _it_! Bodahn, I'm coming in!"

Bodahn gave me as annoyed a look as his pleasant, round face could manage as I swung myself up onto the wagon's tongue. "You can't all ride in there for long," he warned. "As soon as the road starts to rise again, when we get to the foothills, you have to get out. The mules can't pull you all uphill."

"Yeah, but that's then. This is now." I squeezed past him into the covered part of the wagon and was greeted by eight somber, bearded faces. "How're you all holding up?"

Oghren grunted. His was the only face not looking up at me, instead covered by his helmet, his head pillowed on a folded blanket and a bucket near at hand. "Worst hangover ever."

We reached the rest stop we had planned to camp at well before dinner and so there was plenty of time to teach everyone how to pitch their tents. Wynne lit a roaring fire with a word and a gesture, causing the new dwarves to drop their chins on the ground in amazement. The onset of night meant they could all take off the welding helmets protecting them from the sun, and I told them all that the stars were glowing crystals in the "roof" of the sky, remembering how scared I'd been when Duncan told me they were giant floating fireballs. Wynne clicked her tongue in disapproval of the falsehood but she subsided when I kicked her ankle and glared.

"It figures, now that she's got an audience, she lights the fire herself instead of making me do it the hard way," Alistair muttered to me while we struggled out of our outerwear and got ready for sleep. "So much for building character and independence."

"No, no, it just means your character is already built up as high as it goes," I said. I regarded my bedroll with active dislike. "That is a serious step down from the Warden suite."

"Are you spoiled already?" Alistair teased. "That didn't take long."

"Oh? We'll see who got spoiled the first time you have to bathe in cold water," I retorted.

He shivered and dove under his blanket, as though chilled at the very thought. "Maybe I can put off bathing at all until we get to Redcliffe."

"Not if you want to share a tent with me, you won't." I pulled the blanket up to my neck and snuggled up against Alistair's shoulder, resting my head on his arm. "You make a good pillow."

"Oh good, I'm so glad – oof! Watch it with the elbows!"

I climbed up on top of him and curled up on his chest and belly. "There we go. Now I have a nice, warm, cushy mattress to lie on."

"This isn't working for me," he wheezed. "I'm squished. And I'm not a piece of furniture, you know! I'm a person!"

"Don't be such a baby."

"Fine-" He wrapped his arms around me and rolled over quickly so I was beneath him. "There. Turnabout is fair play." Even so, he was carefully supporting his weight on his elbows. If I really wanted to, I could have wriggled away easily enough. Because I _could_ have escaped, I didn't want to. It was more fun to play along.

"Geroffme, you big bronto!" I gasped and squirmed. "You're huge and heavy! Not fair!"

"You're right, it's not fair at all." He slid off to one side. "You're not comfortable at all as a mattress."

"Never thought I'd be grateful to be all knees and elbows."

"Oy," shouted a dwarven voice from outside our tent. "We can all hear you flirting – go to sleep!"

"Whoops," Alistair whispered.

"I bet you're blushing."

"Ssh!"

* * *

We walked down the mountains and backwards through the seasons, winter melting away into autumn until we crested the last russet-colored ridge and descended into Redcliffe, where the trees were still half green. Leliana had showed us how to braid the fiery leaves into garlands, and she, Morrigan and myself were all bedecked with flame-colored coronets, which the other dwarves clearly found foolish since the leaves wouldn't last more than a day so why bother making them at all?

"They have a point," I said to Leliana. "Can't we make them last somehow? Dry them or press them?" I was thinking of Alistair's rose, still carefully preserved in his little book of prayers.

She shook her head. "You can, but they are never as lovely. They lose the translucence that makes them glow."

"Autumn is an ephemeral beauty," Morrigan said. "Like so many things in nature, one must take pleasure in it while it lasts, and not try to force it to remain when its season is past."

"Not everything natural is temporary," I said stoutly. "Gold and jewels and other things the Stone makes can last forever if nothing ruins them."

"Hear, hear," rumbled a nearby dwarven engineer.

"Oh, _Maker_." Alistair's stunned cry brought us all to a stop. In the vanguard as usual, he must be able to see something I couldn't – I ran to the wagon and climbed up its side to get a higher vantage point and discovered that Redcliffe Village had come into view.

The village seemed all right, but busier than I remembered. I squinted, compensating for the slight nearsightedness of subterranean eyes, and realized it wasn't just busy; it was crammed full of tents, lean-tos and other temporary dwellings. The castle itself belched out far more smoke than I'd seen it do before, attesting to how its kitchen fires were working hard to feed its extra population.

Zevran appeared beside me to take in the view, having no trouble focusing his large elven eyes, and I tugged on his sleeve to ask what was happening. "Refugee camps," he answered simply.

"Guess you brought the dwarves just in time," Oghren said cheerfully.

I glanced over to him and noted that he had combed and re-braided his beard for the first time since leaving the dwarven city. His eyes were bright under his helmet and he had eaten with hearty appetite at dinner last night. I sidled over to walk beside him as our little caravan wended downhill and said, "They have booze in Redcliffe."

"Surface booze," Oghren said, with badly feigned disinterest.

"Stay away from it," I urged in a tight whisper for his ears only. "Remember how sick you were when we were just out of the city? And in the Deep Roads? You're feeling better now, aren't you? Don't throw away all the progress you've made."

"Bah, don't go all mushy on me, woman," he growled.

"I mean it. Stay away from their awful beer – it's not worth it, honestly." He started to speak again and I punched his arm lightly. "And don't insult me by saying you'll just have one or two drinks. You and I both know that's a lie."

"You giving me an order, miss high and mighty Gray Warden?"

I thought about it. It was tempting, but... It seemed like I'd be setting myself up to be disobeyed. Bherat used to say he never gave an order unless he knew damned well he could enforce it. "No. We might be there for a little while and it's your business what you do when you're not on duty. But if you show up for duty drunk or hung over, then it's _my_ business, and I won't be happy. Got it?"

"Got it."

We crossed the bridge and made our way through squads of soldiers practicing archery in the castle yard. New fortifications were being built in the form of arrow towers so more men could shoot over the battlements, but construction was going slowly due to a lack of trained manpower. We left Bodahn and Sandal with the mules in the stables and went inside, through the bustling castle and upstairs to knock on the door to Eamon's study.

The door was flung open immediately and revealed a beaming Teagan, who threw an arm around Alistair's shoulder for a manly hug while Eamon levered himself up from his chair with the aid of a hand on his desk. Once standing, he didn't seem to need any help to walk, and he came out into the hallway after his brother.

"Well met and welcome back, Wardens," Eamon said with a smile that also encompassed our non-Warden companions. His eyes lit on the troop of engineers standing silently a little further down the hallway. A few of them were examining the castle's stonework with critical frowns but they snapped to attention when they realized the Arl was looking at them. Eamon's smile faded a little as he realized they weren't the fighting dwarves he'd hoped for.

"These are engineers and quartermasters sent in advance of the army," I hastened to explain.

"Ah." He nodded, smiling again, and gave a short bow to the group. "Stone met, and welcome to Redcliffe. Please, make yourselves at home."

"I can take them to see our quartermaster and discuss their army's bivouac," Teagan suggested. Eamon nodded, and Teagan left with the engineers in tow.

"We have much to discuss," Eamon said gravely, gesturing for us to follow him to his study, a room with enough chairs for all of us. "The blight continues apace, and the darkspawn come closer every day."

"We saw the refugees," Alistair said as we all found seats around the small table in the study's center. "We should have been faster, come back sooner. I'm sorry."

"I'm sure you did the best you could do," Eamon said. "What can you tell me about the situation in Orzammar? I heard from the caravans that the city was closed."

Alistair looked at me to answer; I started to speak my mind, then realized I was talking to Eamon, as in _Arl_ Eamon, and I should keep scathing remarks about the nobility to a minimum. Of what I'd intended to say, the only part that was socially acceptable was the word "the." Leliana saw me flailing to rephrase and she smoothly stepped in, delivering an oration worthy of an Assembly meeting.

Teagan came back in at the tail end of her speech, just in time for her to bottom-line it for him, and took a seat next to Morrigan. She responded to his friendly smile by shifting her chair an inch or so further away. Unperturbed, he redirected the smile at Alistair and said, "It certainly sounds like you've been busy. Well done, ser."

"Wellllll, I didn't exactly do it alone." Alistair's cheeks reddened. "We all pretty much did what Latitia told us to do."

"Yes," Eamon said, a faint frown crossing his face as he looked at me. "That seems to happen on a regular basis. Tell me, Latitia, what do _you_ think our next move should be?"

I blinked and sat back in my chair, taken aback. "Well I don't know. I thought that once we got all three treaties fulfilled, you'd take over."

Eamon smiled faintly. "Somehow I doubt you will magically turn into an unquestioning soldier."

I shrugged. "As long as you don't want me to do anything really stupid."

He chuckled. "I always endeavor to avoid stupidity. Very well, then, if you are willing to follow my lead, then what I want to do is travel to Denerim via the Imperial Highway. I want-"

"Absolutely not, Eamon," Teagon cut him off, slapping a hand down on the table. "It is far too dangerous. There are darkspawn everywhere to the south!"

"It had always been my intention to go south and witness the nature of the blight," Eamon said, his gray eyes cool. "Originally, you may recall that I was to fight at Ostagar. I was denied that battle by the late King's eagerness and Loghain's treachery, but I must still see the blight with my own eyes. How can I argue convincingly at the Landsmeet that this is indeed a blight if Loghain has seen it, and I have not?"

"But, Eamon," Teagan dropped his voice low, "you are still recovering your strength-"

"I have no intention of raising a sword and charging the darkspawn myself," Eamon said with asperity. "I shall ride in a carriage surrounded by guards and in danger of nothing more deadly than boredom during the long drive."

"Awkward," I whispered to Alistair. He stifled a laugh and kept his eyes firmly fixed on his hands while the brothers argued.

"Fine. I cannot stop you. And I suppose I shall be left behind to manage Redcliffe," Teagan said. Eamon nodded; Teagan's generous mouth thinned with disapproval but he yielded to his older brother, settling back in his chair.

"Once we arrive in Denerim," Eamon went on as though nothing had happened, "I will need you, Latitia, as well as your friends, to travel about the city and do what you can to garner support for our cause among the lesser banns and other members of the Landsmeet. As Gray Wardens, you should be able to move freely enough, and as a dwarf, you should not pose a particular political threat to anybody. Your opinion would be seen as far more neutral than mine or Alistair's, seeing as we are, after all, trying to put him on the throne."

"Are we still doing that?" Alistair asked miserably.

"It is the only way we can unite enough of the Lansdmeet to stand against Loghain," Eamon said with total certainty. "We need Calenhad's heir, a man of royal blood. Ferelden deserves nothing less."

"And if we lose the Landsmeet... what would happen?" I wondered, trying to ignore the sick feeling in my stomach.

"We would lose Ferelden," Eamon stated. "Loghain thinks the blight is an enemy he can outmaneuver, one that will wait patiently while he finishes his civil war. He is wrong. Loghain is a great general and he will fight brilliantly down to the last man, but he will be destroyed, Ferelden along with him."

After that, I didn't feel like talking any more, and neither did Alistair; our friends all had that glazed-over look that kids get when they know they aren't welcome to contribute to the grown-ups' conversation. I was pretty sure Oghren was asleep, actually, which was probably the Stone's own blessing. But Eamon wasn't done, not by a long shot. There were lists of names, families, banns and arlings, and reports of the hideous losses being inflicted upon Ferelden's heartland.

"Now, once we arrive, I think you should frequent the Gnawed Noble tavern and look for as many of these banns as you can," he said, handing over the list of the hardest-hit territories. "Assuming they are alive and able to come, of course. They will be receptive to talk of the blight and likely resentful of Loghain for engaging in civil war when they needed his support to defend their lands."

"Okay," I said.

"Meanwhile, I will speak with the nobility who own estates in the city, who will not be in the Gnawed Noble," Eamon continued. "I should be able to get a better picture of how the balance of power stands in the upper echelons, and learn where we need to strike in order to undermine Loghain's support."

"Okay."

He leaned forward, gray eyes intense. "Loghain is a dangerous man. He has ordered your death once already. Alistair and Latitia, you may both be in danger once he knows you are there; I advise you to avoid any confrontation with him personally."

"Okay."

Either oblivious or uncaring that we were monosyllabic, Eamon discoursed some more about where he was going, who we should talk to, and so on, until finally it was late enough that we could say we wanted to go to bed.

We filed up the stairs to the guest wing where we usually stayed, which showed signs of having been recently used; I wondered with a pang of guilt whether refugees had been cleared out so we could use them. Wynne and Morrigan disappeared into their own rooms; Zev and Leliana were lingering in the hallway, talking in hushed tones punctuated by the occasional deep chuckle or winsome giggle, respectively. I followed Alistair into our room and closed the door.

"Alistair," I said.

"Hmm?" He sat on the edge of the bed to unlace his boots, depression showing in the slump of his shoulders.

"Loghain is the problem here, isn't he."

"No, the archdemon is the problem," he said. He dropped a boot to the floor and started on the other one. "But yeah, from what Eamon says, Loghain is the beast we have to defeat first. The murdering bastard."

I watched him carefully as I asked, "Do you wish he were dead?"

"Maker forgive me, yes, I do." He pulled off his other boot and flopped backward onto the bed, throwing an arm over his face with a groan. "I've never really wanted anyone dead before. I mean, sure, people have tried to kill us so we killed them first, but... I didn't really hate them."

"It wasn't personal."

"Yeah." He lay there for a moment. "The Chantry says hate is a sin."

I snorted. "They say a lot of things. They break their rules when it suits them."

"I didn't want to break this one. But... Duncan was... and the other Wardens, I mean, I barely had any time with them before they were all-" He stopped, the words choked in his throat.

"And now Eamon thinks you have to leave the Wardens entirely, to put your tight buns on the throne just so Loghain can't sit there. And even after all this work, we still might lose."

"Yeah."

I climbed up on the bed and lay beside him, propped up on one elbow. "You know... He can't win if he's dead."

Alistair's lip curled in a tooth-baring smile. "I hear that."

"Even if we put you on the throne, he'll be a thorn in your side as long as he lives. He's a teyrn, he's got power."

"A king could strip that from him." Suddenly he sat up and slapped a hand down on the blanket, venting some frustration. "But that isn't enough! He has to pay for what he's done!"

It seemed clear to me that he would not object to what I had in mind. "Let's kill him. Now, before the Landsmeet. Get his conniving arse out of the way so we can get down to business. Every day we waste with this stupid politicking is costing lives, and – sod it all." A thought occurred to me that, incredibly, I hadn't processed until now. "They're making more broodmothers, too."

"Capturing Ferelden women and dragging them underground," Alistair groaned. "Oh, Maker. You're right. It wouldn't be only dwarven women that they'd do that to. You're right, we have to kill him, but how? He won't accept a challenge from me, he'll laugh in my face."

"I'll take care of it," I said. "You can't be the one to do it. Think how it would look if you kill him right before the Landsmeet where Eamon intends to make a bid for power with you. You'll look like a power-hungry mercenary who murdered a national hero for his own gain."

He threw up his hands and stood up to pace around the room in agitation. "You want me to just sit it out while _you_ fight him? He's three times your bodyweight and a seasoned warrior! Why would he fight you, anyway? He'd look like a bully picking on a little girl."

"I'll bring Zev and Leliana, and I have no intention of fighting fair." I gave him a cheeky grin. "You know I never play nice when I can fight dirty."

He grimaced. "I should object, but... if anyone ever deserved your Rogue Squad to gang up on him, it's the man who slaughtered the Wardens and left the blight to ravage Ferelden unchallenged." He sat back down with a thump and dropped his face into his hands. "I can't believe we're really doing this. We're planning a murder, aren't we?"

"Didn't Duncan say that the Wardens have always done whatever is necessary to combat a blight?" I challenged.

He nodded silently.

"Zev and Leli and me are going to go to Denerim on the north road past the Tower," I said. "We'll bring Wynne and stop to talk to the mages about how they're doing, whether they're ready to muster for the battle."

"Ookay – wait, just you guys? Not me?" He lifted his head and looked at me, confused.

"I think it's better if you stay with Eamon. Keep some distance between yourself and Loghain's death."

He frowned. "I don't think it's a good idea to split up. I really don't like the idea of getting separated, I mean, what if Loghain has more assassins looking for us?"

"We'll blend in. I'm good at not being noticed." I pushed myself off the bed and started for the door. "I'm gonna talk to the others. Don't wait up."

"Oh."

He looked so miserable, I felt guilty for leaving him alone. I went to him and climbed up on the bed to give him a good firm hug. "It's gonna be okay," I told him. "I promise."

Then I got up, went to Zev's door and knocked. "Guys?"

The door opened to reveal a shirtless Zevran holding a pair of spurs, several leather belts, and a feather. "Yes? What can I do for you?" He saw me staring at the feather and added in a sultry purr, "Care to join us?"

"What? No!" I tore my gaze away and pushed past him, closing the door behind me. "No, this is professional. I'm not here to talk to my buddies Zev and Leli."

Leliana appeared behind Zev, fastening a robe around herself. "You're not?" she asked, perplexed.

"No. I'm here to talk to Zevran the Antivan Crow and Leliana the Orliesan Bard. I have a job for you."

"Excellent," Zevran said, his golden face splitting into a grin that showed all his teeth. "I was wondering why we were persisting in this nonsense. All this political machination and strenuous effort, not to mention placing a youth on the throne who devoutly wishes to be anywhere else, all to circumvent one inconvenient man? In Antiva, we have better ways of dealing with this sort of thing."

"Of course, it is not so simple as slipping a knife in his back and leaving his corpse in the street," Leliana added. She tied a knot in the belt of her robe and sat in a velvet-cushioned chair near their bedroom fire.

"It is precisely that simple," Zevran said, taking the seat opposite her. "He is in the way, and we shall remove him."

"We must arrange for blame to fall where we will it to," Leliana argued. "We cannot just slay him and let everyone start pointing fingers at random. We must ensure the fingers point where it most benefits our cause."

"Wait a minute," I said. "I haven't even named names yet, are you telling me you've been chomping at the bit to murder Loghain and only _my_ prudishness was stopping you?"

"Alistair's, actually," Leliana said apologetically.

"He has objected strenuously to... _underhanded_ methods in the past," Zevran explained.

Leliana said, "Does he know of your plan, incidentally? Or must we keep this a secret?"

"He knows," I said. "He's graciously agreed to make an exception to his usual rules in this one case."

"How kind," Zev murmured.

"You know," Leliana said tentatively, "without Loghain to marshal opposition, Eamon will likely have a great deal more success at the Landsmeet. He may not even require Alistair as a rallying point."

I shook my head. "I don't want to get my hopes up until we see how this all plays out. Who else would be king, if not him? Eamon? He's already said that he doubts the Lansdmeet would follow him."

"But that was when he had Loghain opposing him. In the absence of a strong alternative-"

I stood up abruptly, cutting her off. "We'll have to see. I think we should leave tomorrow morning, so we have as much of a head start as possible. Agreed?"

Zevran nodded. Leliana started to argue, to persuade me that a future with Alistair was possible, and Zev laid a hand on hers, a restraining gesture disguised as a caress. She cast him a quick glance and he shook his head almost imperceptibly; I could have kissed him for understanding that I could not afford to hope. Leliana sighed, looked back to me and merely said, "Sleep well."


	69. A Dark Night in Denerim

Denerim's sea breeze tugged hard at my jacket; I pulled it tight around me and pressed myself against the cold slates of the merchant's guildhall roof, causing a sleepy pigeon to flutter away with an indignant coo. I peered over the roof's peak, glad of my dark-vision in the moonless night, and watched a guard patrol move along the wall of Fort Drakon. The wind blew through my clothes again and I wished for my cloak – but cloaks flap and tangle and get snagged on things, so I was stuck with just a jacket while the ocean blew its cold, fish-scented breath at me.

The guards turned around to walk back in the opposite direction. "Clear," I breathed.

Leliana scaled the roof and appeared beside me. We were using the thieves' highway, skulking across the rooftops through the palace district. Our target, the Royal Palace itself, was overlooked by the walls of Fort Drakon and its guards, and had open space all around it that made it impossible to get closer than 40 paces or so. Leliana had assured us that this would not be a problem.

Now, she squinted in the moonless night, looking for the best way to make the crossing to the next building; I pointed to a gabled window that jutted out from the merchants' guildhall towards the stonemasons', which was incrementally closer to the royal palace. She nodded her agreement and slipped nimbly down to the gable, where she crouched like a cat and waited for me to catch up. Together we leaped the narrow distance between the two rooftops and immediately froze in place, straining to hear any cries of alarm the soft sound of our crossing might have caused. There were none, thank the ancestors.

We made two more such crossings, each time obliged to wait for a moment when the patrols had their backs to us, until we reached a building on the edge of the Palace plaza. It was a bakery, and all bakers have to rise long before dawn to make their loaves, which means they have to go to bed early, which (hopefully) meant that the owner of this particular bakery was sound asleep and would not notice a duster breaking into his attic. Leliana kept a firm grip on my belt while I leaned over the edge of the roof and grappled with the lock on the single window; it gave way with a minimum of fuss and I swung myself into the attic, my landing silenced by bags and bags of flour. A moment later, Leliana's feet appeared over the edge of the roof and I guided her inside.

We waited, and watched the Palace. Compared to the sheer vastness of Fort Drakon, the Palace looked like a country estate: comfortable and well-appointed, but hardly royal. From here we could see pumpkins growing in the kitchen garden, illuminated by stripes of warm firelight shining through the slats in the kitchen's window shutters. Guard patrols moved in circles around the Palace and along the wall of Fort Drakon, calling to each other like wolves in the night.

At this point, we had gone beyond my areas of expertise and into Leliana's. And Zevran's. Honestly, it was my opinion that his part of this job was the hardest of all. I leaned towards Leliana to whisper, "What if Zev can't get that maid to leave Loghain's curtains open?"

"Then we will try again tomorrow," Leliana replied with no trace of concern. "We have at least one more day before Eamon arrives."

"Two days isn't very long for Zev to establish a relationship with her."

"Really? It might as well be two years to a man of Zevran's considerable charms. I have utter confidence that he will have met only token resistance from the maid. An Orlesian elf, serving in the royal palace at Denerim? She must be hungry for flattery and affection from a handsome man, after all the scorn she has endured on account of her birth," Leliana said. She was assembling her nifty collapsible sniper's bow, the movements so practiced that the darkness did not inconvenience her.

"But doesn't it seem suspicious? Asking her to leave just that one curtain open?"

"They are all open during the day. It is the maid's task to close them at night. All he needs to do is distract her from that task."

"Ah."

A flutter of wings, and Morrigan the raven dropped out of the sky to land on the windowsill with a light clicking of talons. She fluffed out her black feathers and cawed softly.

I gave her an annoyed look. "What? I don't speak bird."

She shimmered and blurred into human shape, let out a huff of breath and whispered, "Loosely translated, it means _Hello_. Aerial surveillance reveals a flaw in your planned escape route. There is a city guard patrolman who has settled down at the corner where you planned to climb down from the roofs."

"At the corner of Canal Street and Governer's Way?" I breathed, sudden anxiety clutched at my stomach.

"Yes. There is also some sort of activity going on at the Arl of Denerim's estate, I know not what."

"Sod."

"Yes."

"Why are we doing it this way again?" I hissed. "There has to be some way to assassinate someone that's less, I don't know, overt. Can't we make it look like an accident?"

"If we had weeks to analyze Loghain's daily patterns, a great deal of gold to bribe his servants, and access to sophisticated poisons, we could make it look like he died of disease," Leliana whispered patiently. "But we do not, and violent 'accidents' carry with them too much chance of failure and subsequent paranoia on the part of the mark, which could make him inaccessible."

"But Morrigan could-"

"Morrigan could slay him, but then his death would be obviously magical, and we agreed that stirring up hatred for mages was unwise if we wish to have them available to fight the darkspawn. My arrows are uniquely bardic and should place blame for this squarely on the Bards instead. Fereldens are always ready to believe that Orlais is the enemy. Nobody will look elsewhere for persons to blame when they can point their fingers at Orlais, so we should thus be safe. Our plan will work, I am sure of it. Morrigan's assistance raises the odds of success to quite high indeed."

Morrigan preened at having her skills recognized, and the three of us settled back into waiting. I ran my fingers over my elven bow, wishing fervently that I had practiced more, but Leliana seemed sure I'd be okay. I wasn't the one making the kill-shot, anyway; I was just supposed to hit the window and break the glass to clear the path for Leliana's arrow, which might otherwise have been knocked off its course. I had new arrows for this purpose, with wide, bladed heads to shatter a big hole in the glass.

And then it happened: a faint light wavered in the Regent's suite. The light grew stronger and steadier as lamps were lit and Leliana stood up, ready to shoot, one hip leaning against the windowsill for stability. I copied her action, nocking an arrow, and together we waited for the right moment.

We could see into the bedroom; the curtains were indeed open. A four-posted bed with heavy drapes stood near the window, and we could see the covers hadn't been turned down, either. Zevran had distracted the maid very thoroughly, it would seem; she hadn't ever made it out of the servant's quarters.

A shadow passed between the window and the lamp, and Loghain appeared in our field of view. He was holding a sheaf of papers in one hand and a mug in the other, and he looked exhausted even from where we stood. His shoulders were rounded with fatigue and his deep-set eyes darkly shadowed.

My conscious smote me unexpectedly. Loghain didn't look like a mass murderer or a power-grabbing monomaniac; he looked like a man at the age when the body's pains begin to weigh him down but his work is not yet done. Here we were about to pounce on this unsuspecting man when he was exhausted and wanted nothing more than simple sleep.

Then Loghain noticed the open curtains. He scowled, set down his papers and drink, and walked to the window. He raised his arms to pull the curtains closed. Morrigan flicked her fingers and muttered a word and he stiffened, his face paralyzed in an expression of surprise. I drew my bow, held my breath, aimed, and released; the arrow sped across the intervening space, and the pane of glass in front of Loghain's chest broke apart into glittering shards. A half-second later, Leliana's feathered shaft struck his heart. From where her arrow struck, he was surely dead by the time the paralysis spell wore off and released his body to fall limply to the floor.

Leliana efficiently snapped her bow into its component parts and stowed them in the carrying harness while Morrigan regained her raven form. I just stared at the window where our victim had stood. A fine red spray glistened on the window's remaining glass and I couldn't tear my eyes from it.

"Hurry," Leliana hissed in my ear. "Someone is sure to investigate the sound of breaking glass. We must go."

"I... I've never killed anyone like that before," I stammered, unable to put my shock into words.

It had been so cold and calculated. So impersonal. It was all well and good to plan a murder, to know it needed to be done, but it was entirely different to watch a helpless victim die because I had willed it so.

"The feeling will fade," Leliana assured me. She took my bow out of my numb fingers and slung it over her own back, then pulled hard on my arm, forcing me to turn away. "Let us go, now, while escape is still an option."

Leliana put one foot up on the windowsill and looked out to check on the guard patrols. And then the nugshit hit the ventilator. A shadow passed across Loghain's bedroom, followed by the person who had cast it, a short, wiry man who moved with the predatory creep of a deepstalker. He knelt over Loghain's body and yanked out Leliana's arrow. He stood up to examine it, ignoring the corpse at his feet, and the light of the lamp finally shone on his thin face.

Leliana gasped in recognition.

"Who-" I started to ask, but stopped when the rat-faced man slowly turned his head to look out the window. Right at Leliana.

"_ASSASSIN_!" he roared.

"Run, now!" Leliana swung herself out of the window with little regard for silence and scrambled up onto the roof. I started to follow her, then realized that, whoever this guy was, I probably didn't want to be seen by him.

Instead, I turned and clambered over the flour sacks to the attic door. I burst through it and caromed down the stairs on the other side in a barely controlled fall. A short corridor at the bottom branched into three rooms, the baker's living quarters; I chose the one on the opposite side of the building from the Palace and flung it open, crossed the dark room on the other side at a dead sprint and crashed into the closed shutters of its single window. They refused to open and I began fumbling with the latch.

"Wha – who – "

I glanced over my shoulder and saw I was in the baker's bedroom. The baker was tangled in his sheets and trying to get up, but still fuddled with sleep; I ignored him and threw the shutters open. I spared an instant to glance around the street, saw a drainpipe a few feet to my left, and lunged at it.

The drainpipe immediately broke. It let out a tortured scream punctuated by several sharp _pings_ as bolts snapped and it began to bend. "Typical," I muttered as I slipped hand-over-hand along the folding pipe until I could let go and drop onto a canvas booth. The material folded up around me and barely slowed me, but it was okay because my ass broke my fall.

"Oww," I complained under my breath, but I didn't have time to wallow in my own misfortune.

I kicked and struggled my way free of the canvas and scooted for the closest alley. Unspeakable liquids spattered my boots as I ran flat-out down the twisting alley, past overflowing dumpsters and the a homeless family huddled against the walls. Behind me, I heard shouts and a madly ringing bell – a city guard patrol had heard the drainpipe's death scream and come running. I wanted to swear but saved my breath for running.

Morrigan flapped past my head in a rush of black feathers, zoomed to the end of the alley and then veered in a sharp right. I missed a step in confusion, but then decided I was supposed to follow her; I skidded around the corner in time to see her tail disappear into the darkness under an awning and ran after her just before another guard patrol, in Palace uniforms this time, came around the corner to my left. There were no shouts or running feet, so they must not have spotted me. I crept silently through the deep shadows until I could duck into the alcove a doorway.

The raven fluttered to the ground and stalked over to stand in front of me, somehow managing to express disapproval with her beady little bird eyes. I spread my hands helplessly and she fluffed out her feathers in an avian approximation of a disgusted sigh. Then we both froze, waiting like frightened rabbits as the squad of Palace guardsmen rattled past at a jog, until their footsteps receded around a corner.

_Why are there so many guards?_ I wondered. There hadn't been nearly so many last night when we had scoped the place out, or even earlier tonight. Somehow during the past hour the streets of the palace district had been flooded with armed men. Frantically I tried to remember Leliana's map of the city, to plan a new route to the sleazy tavern where we had planned to lay low until Eamon arrived. I had to hope that Leliana would make it there on her own, safe on the rooftops, and make my own way there on foot.

And then the simplicity of it struck me so hard, I had to fight not to laugh. The city was full of homeless refugees. I'd just passed a whole family of them in that alley. All I had to do was stash my expensive gear someplace safe and settle down behind a trash can somewhere, get cozy with the rats, and nobody would look at me twice. In the morning I could blend into the regular citizenry and make my inconspicuous escape. I was whispering this plan to Morrigan when a scream split the night air.

"Got 'er!" shouted a young man's voice, followed by several thumps and bangs that ended in a tremendous crash of broken pottery and a familiar, feminine voice moaning in pain.

"Great shot," said another guard. "Plucked 'er right outta the air. All right, boys, clap some irons on the wench and let's take 'er back to Arl Howe."

So much for hiding the Gray Warden involvement. I couldn't just let them take her without a fight.

"Where is she?" I demanded of Morrigan. She shook her head stubbornly, the human gesture odd on a bird's body, and I hissed, "I'm not leaving her here to be executed! Help me, and we might stand a chance."

Doubt was evident in every feather, but she flapped heavily to gain altitude and disappeared into the moonless sky. I waited for a subjective eternity before she fluttered back down, zoomed in a loop around my head, and then flapped off down the street to the west. I followed her around a corner and into a small produce booth, its baskets empty for the night. From here I could see the guards dragging Leliana towards the Palace.

She stumbled along, limping heavily, with blood running freely from a crossbow bolt embedded in her left thigh. Her left wrist looked like it might be sprained or broken from her fall, from the way she was trying to keep the heavy manacles from touching it too much; frankly, it was a testament to her tumbling skills that she had survived the fall at all. The squad of guards consisted of five rather sloppy-looking private security mercenaries, each equipped with a sword and a plain steel cuirass to protect his torso. Two walked in front of their prisoner, two behind, and one walked beside her with a firm hand on her elbow. They were swaggering with pride at having caught the assassin and not at all expecting to be attacked from behind.

My soft boots made no sound on the rounded cobbles of the street, and the first warning that the rearmost guard had was my blade sinking into the side of his neck. I jerked the dagger out, awkwardly due to the difference in our height, and his blood jetted out to splash across Leliana's back as the stricken guard let out a gurgle and fell to his knees. She flinched, lost her balance and fell to one knee, gasping in pain, and was forgotten as the remaining four guards cried out in alarm.

The second of the two rear guards ripped his sword from its scabbard and drew his arm back to swing at me, exposing the gap between the front and rear plates of his cuirass in the process. I lunged at the opening and my off-hand dagger slid between his ribs and perforated his right lung, not an instantly fatal wound but enough to make most men think hard about whether they were being paid enough. He threw himself away from me, landed hard on his arse and began scrambling away from the fight on all fours.

Silvery light flashed over us and Morrigan rose up into her tall human form a few feet away, just enough of a distraction that the guard who had been dragging Leliana messed up the blow he'd aimed at my face. His sword whistled over my head, so close it might have given me a nice haircut if the sword had had a better edge. Morrigan shouted at me to duck, and then ice exploded from her two hands, the force of it lashing at my clothing and numbing my cheeks as it roared over my head.

The guards weren't so lucky; the closest one stiffened and fell over. His extended sword arm snapped off at the shoulder when he hit the hard cobbles and shattered into chunks of red ice. Behind him, the other two guards yelped in surprise and it occurred to me that they might not ever have seen a mage use magic before. Frost coated their bodies and their metal armor seared into them everywhere it touched skin. They shrieked in agony and backed frantically away from the witch.

"Geran? Is that you?" called a man from way too nearby. "What in the Maker's name is going on?"

"Help!" the guard with the pierced lung cried, the end of the word dissolving into a wracking cough. The newcomer broke into a run and I could hear the jingle of mail – he was leading another of the guard squads right to us.

Time to go. I grabbed Leliana's arm, propped myself under her shoulder and fought to pull her back to her feet. The cobbles were slippery with bits of ice and Leliana couldn't use her bound hands to steady herself. Almost whimpering with the need to hurry, I stuffed my bloody daggers into my pockets and heaved her up by the waist.

"Go, run," she panted, white with pain. "I cannot keep up."

"She is correct," Morrigan said over her shoulder. She held her staff in her hands and was sending balls of ice through it at the running guards, but the iceballs seemed like little more than an inconvenience.

"Don't be stupid," I snarled and dragged Leliana several steps towards the nearest alley.

From which exploded _another_ squad of five guards. I stopped and looked around in panic, straining my ears for the sound of running feet, and heard two more groups coming. Every guard in the district, it seemed, had heard the shrieks of pain and responded with distressing speed.

And now the first group of reinforcements reached us. Morrigan was ready and sent electricity crackling from her staff to flash along the armor of the leader, raising a cloud of smoke and the stench of burning hair. "_I am your death!_" she screamed at the men and raised her hands to the sky. She brought down shards of ice from the air, called freezing winds, sheeted the cobbles with slippery frost, and guards fell, but there were still more. I had my hands full defending the helpless Leliana and had never wished for Alistair's shield as badly as I did when I saw her magic run dry and sputter out, leaving her standing defenseless in a crowd of armed men.

Her skin was like ash, but she managed to gasp out one more word and a familiar ripple in the air spread out from her to stun the guards and buy just a few seconds of time. She swayed and leaned on her staff, then closed her eyes and, with visible effort, shrank down into her raven shape and began flapping hard to get off the ground in the dead night air. I whooped in delight and tried to seize the moment to drag Leliana, nearly fainting from pain and blood loss, away from the fight as Morrigan rose above the heads of the guards.

"Oy! Don't let the bitch get away," shouted one of the wounded men on the ground, propped up on one elbow and pointing at the black bird. He picked up a loose cobble and threw it at her.

"Look out!" I shouted.

The raven glanced at me, its eyes glittering with reflected torchlight. Then the rock hit her. A puff of black feathers flew up and she was smashed out of the air to tumble and slide over the ground until she disappeared under a market booth.

"You nug-humping bastard," I raged impotently at the rock-thrower. He grinned weakly at where she had fallen, then sagged backwards to the ground as his wounds caught up with him and dragged him into unconsciousness. The stunning spell wore off of the other guards and they looked around in confusion, then settled their gaze on me and my limp Bardic burden.

"Take them in," commanded one of the sergeants, and there really wasn't anything I could do.

* * *

_Special thanks as always to my highly skilled beta, mille libri, and to everyone who has read, favorited, and especially Caleb Nova, Enaid Aderyn, Arsinoe de Blassenville, Cruellye, and DeathDragon30 for their reviews. I feel sad for murdering a main character, but at least I didn't behead him in front of his daughter and all his peers and co-workers in the middle of the landsmeet, which is frankly tacky. Now it's time for the law of unintended consequences..._


	70. The Dungeon Dance

_Warning, rated M for dungeons. If you get uncomfortable, you can scroll to the horizontal line to skip to the next scene. Thank you for reading, favoriting, and especially reviewing, and special shout-outs to my invaluable beta and friend mille libri for vastly improving the clarity of my Ferelden politics._

* * *

Two of the surviving guards pulled my hands behind my back and shackled them together. A third patted me down for anything sharp while the rest attended to their fallen. The experience of being held helpless and groped might have been worse for me if I hadn't been more worried for my friends. I tried not to look at the deep shadows under the booth where Morrigan had fallen, lest a guard decide to go look and see what I was so interested in; meanwhile, Leliana was wilting like a flower, her eyelids fluttering vaguely as she lay in a slowly spreading puddle of her own blood.

"All right then," said the guard who had first ordered me arrested, "Avery, Jonsson, escort the skinny bitch to Arl Howe's prison. Big Abe, carry the assassin, looks like she's in no fit shape to walk. Everyone else, stay here and do what you can for the wounded. I'll ask His Lordship to send his healer as soon as I can."

The guards led us just a few blocks further to a walled estate, which contained a massive structure that was closer to a castle than a house. We passed through an imposing gatehouse and around to the rear of the keep to the servant's entrance, which was opened for us by a sleepy guard stationed beside it. Inside, we passed a kitchen with a single elven baker in it before proceeding down a long hallway lined with closed doors.

I was paying attention to all this because every tiny piece of knowledge might be important later when I escaped, and also because I was scared shitless. Leliana hung like a rag doll over Big Abe's shoulder and her leg had stopped bleeding, which was a bad thing because it meant her body was running low on blood. Plus, we were quite likely to be executed without a trial. Call me a coward, but the prospect of being summarily killed with no ability to defend myself was upsetting me, just a little.

Okay, more than a little.

When we reached the end of the hall, the head guard took out a ring of keys and selected the shiniest of the brass keys. This he used to unlock the last door, revealing an opulently furnished bedroom. My eyes rolled around the room in panic, imagining all kinds of sick amusements this Howe guy might have in mind, if he ordered his prisoners to be brought to his sodding _bedroom_. But no, instead we were led to an unsubtly hidden door to a set of stairs that descended into cool, damp darkness punctuated by sputtering torches and reeking of mildew and human waste.

_Oh goodie, _I thought,_ a nice old-fashioned dungeon._ No windows or chimneys or garbage chutes or back doors to escape out of. Why couldn't I have been born a miner? I could have dug my way out maybe. Channeled some sort of ancestral miner power to turn my hands into pickaxes... My thoughts spun along like that as our captors exchanged friendly nods with the prison guards and promised to tell them the story of their prowess in capturing the assassins later, over a pint.

"And a truly awesome story it must be," drawled a male voice from a cell off to the side of the corridor. The voice wasn't familiar, but the accent was; he was an Orlesian. "You should be proud indeed to have taken down such mighty prey. Why, that one there is almost half your size. Congra-"

The words cut off with a loud splash as the jailor closest to the speaker threw a bucket of water at him. At least, I hoped it was water. I liked a man who could spit sarcasm at his captors in a place like this.

Soon after that we arrived at a pair of empty cells. They were entirely bare, save for the bucket in the corner of each. Big Abe slung Leliana off his shoulder and stretched her out on the floor of the first cell while I was pushed through the door to the second.

"Aren't you going to help her?" I asked as one of my shackles was unlocked, freeing my left hand, and transferred to a ring in the wall to restrict my movement. "She's dying!"

He snorted and turned away. "We won't let her die, not before Arl Howe is satisfied that he's gotten as much as he can out of her."

Oh, wow. That could mean a lot of things. I kept my mouth shut after that, and waited. A beaten-down elven maidservant came down soon after with a poultice for Leliana and a sharp little knife to dig out the crossbow bolt; I was glad Leliana was out cold when soft, wet noises started coming from her cell, followed by the rough crackling sound of a broken bone being set.

After the elf woman left, nothing happened for what felt like a very long time, though I couldn't really tell. This cellar was sunk into the silty ground of the Denerim river delta, and while I could sense the looming presence of Mount Drakon nearby, its stones were too far away to keep me grounded in time. Someone somewhere was sobbing quietly; someone else was muttering a sort of prayer over and over again, the words lost in the echoes. Eventually I had to deal with the awkwardness of undoing my trousers with one hand so I could use the bucket, the other hand still being chained to the wall. All the while, I fretted about what to do when Howe came.

I remembered Bherat interrogating people, and had done so myself a couple of times. When it was me doing the asking, generally just the threat of handing the interviewee over to Bherat's tender mercies was enough to make them start talking. Bherat himself dealt with the holdouts, the men and women who were committed for whatever reason to keeping their secrets. There seemed to be just a few types of people, when it came to their reactions to torture or threats of torture; some people were obviously terrified and gave up anything asked of them, others blustered until the actual pain started and then backpedaled so fast their mental gears stripped, and a few were genuinely tough men who held out a long, long time until nobody could be sure that the information they finally gave up was true or just mad ravings.

I didn't want to be in that last group, no sir. Images of horribly, irreversibly mangled prisoners flashed through my mind's eye, followed by the memory of the permanently crippled Nadezda. It would be better to seem to be absolutely scared out of my wits and falling over myself to be helpful. I wouldn't have to pretend very hard to seem convincingly frightened, after all. But then Howe would want names. Whose name would I give him? Loghain's assassination had, in all truthfulness, been my own plan, even if I had recruited others to help me. I could tell him that. Would he believe me? Probably not.

Then again... None of the guards I had attacked were still alive. I'd been arrested for being with Leliana, not for harming a guard. Conceivably I could claim ignorance, pretend I didn't even know Loghain was dead...

A heavy door slammed somewhere in the dungeon and was followed by a chorus of clicked heels and cries of "My lord."

"Yes, yes, not now," said a thin, harsh voice. "Bring the prisoners."

"My lord, the assassin you spotted fleeing over the rooftops is still unconscious," a jailor said.

"Then bring the other one."

"Yes, my lord."

Ohshit.

"Is someone out there?" I shouted, putting a tremor in my voice. "Arl Howe? Thank the Maker! Please help me, my lord! I don't know why I'm here! I didn't do anything wrong, there's been some sort of mistake!"

"Isn't that precious." The owner of the harsh voice stalked down the corridor and into my field of view. "Look, Nerron. The little cave rat thinks she's clever. She thinks she can outwit _me_."

Nerron, who turned out to be the jailor, followed his lord and grinned sycophantically. His pecs bulged under his leather vest and one of those stupid-looking thorny tattoos wound around one huge, hairy upper arm. Some people look like they've never heard the word 'hygiene'; Nerron looked like he'd heard it, once, and immediately beaten the person who'd said it into a bloody mush. The person had probably been his mom.

"My lord?" I said, trying to look clueless.

Howe curled his lips into a sneer and turned away with a sound of disgust. "Bring her. Hurry up, now. I don't have all day."

Nerron pulled one of those big rings of keys from a hook on his belt and unlocked my cell. He led me down the hall and around a corner to an extremely alarming room. Huge iron meat-hooks hung from the ceiling like decorations for a really grim party, and rows of spikes jutted from the wall. One spike still had a piece of meat and a scrap of cloth stuck to it. Flies buzzed around it and over a couple of reddish stains on the floor, whizzing away in little clouds when we passed.

The jailor sat me on a chair that was bolted to the floor in front of a butcher's block-style table, then pressed my hands flat on the table and locked them into place with a heavy bar so I couldn't move them at all. We waited while Howe perused a selection of rusted steel implements hung on a rack against the wall. Some of them were sharp, jagged, or pointy; others were horribly blunt. I started to shiver so violently that the chain on my shackles was jingling. The cheerful sound was dreadfully out of place. Howe finally selected a plain-looking claw hammer and stalked to where I sat, bouncing the hammer in his hand as though testing its weight.

"Please don't hurt me," I burst out, and didn't fight the tears that wanted to flow. There was, after all, no point in trying to be tough. There was nobody here that I needed to impress. "Please. Just tell me what you want me to say. I'll say anything. Just please don't hurt me."

"Shut up." Howe slapped me, hard, and I tasted blood as my lower lip split against my teeth.

I shut up.

"I hope you realize I find this extremely distasteful." Howe glared at me as though I had personally offended him. I bit back the snarky response that sprang to mind – _then don't do it_ – and tried to look meek. "There is an art to pain, you know. It should be done right. Just blundering around like a rabid dog is so... unprofessional. But I'm afraid I'm a very busy man right now, and I don't have time to give you the quality of treatment that an _Orlesian spy deserves!_"

The last three words came out as a vicious snarl of pure hate and he brought the hammer down on the first knuckle of my left thumb. I was so shocked at the suddenness of the attack that at first all I felt was cold and the pressure of cracking bones. I let out a strangled whimper. Howe stepped back, breathing hard, and waited while the pain swelled and my brain grappled with the fact that _this is permanent oh Stone he wrecked my thumb it will never heal -_

"You know, the fear of physical damage done to your body is at least as strong as the fear of the pain," he told me, obviously aware of what was going through my mind. "A strong mind can withstand the pain, but can you withstand a future as a useless cripple? I will destroy both your hands, one bone at a time. Then I will start on your feet, and I will enjoy it. Do not doubt me, spy."

I tore my bulging eyes away from my thumb to stare at him, at the madness sitting so plainly now upon his ratlike face. "What do you want?" I wailed, and it was a wail, a sick tortured cry like a nug with its leg in a jaw trap. I wasn't pretending or even exaggerating anymore.

"I want you to tell me what Orlais is planning. I want names, dates, troop positions. I want to know how many Fereldens have betrayed their country, and how many other spies are here." He leaned forward and rested his hands on the table. "Tell me every single thing you know, and I might – _might –_ let you keep your other thumb."

"I don't know anything about Orlais! I swear! I'm a dwarf – I just left Orzammar last spring – I've never been there and I've only ever met a couple Orlesians and I never did anything for Orlais!"

Howe's face contorted into rage and he raised his hammer, but then he stopped, squinting at my face as though really looking at me for the first time. He lowered the hammer and I managed to keep from pissing my trousers. "Last spring? You – you're the new Gray Warden, aren't you? The little slut that useless Duncan brought to Ostagar."

"Yes," I sobbed.

"Not satisfied with killing the King, then, were you?" he snarled. "Had to kill Loghain, too? Ha! Ha, ha, ha! Stupid, stupid little Warden! And where is that other whelp, Maric's bastard? Is he a part of this, too?"

"No," I gasped, placing as much conviction in my voice as I could. "No, he's not even here. He's not in on it, he's with Eamon, he would never agree to assassination."

"Yes... Yes, he did seem the sanctimonious type," Howe mused. "A shame, though, that I don't believe you."

He crushed the first finger on my left hand.

"I hope you appreciate how generous I'm being, by starting on your left hand," he said when I ran out of breath and stopped screaming. "Let's try something else. That wench in the other cell. Who is she?"

"A friend," I panted. "Of mine. Not Alistair's. A friend of mine. A better archer. I couldn't make the shot alone."

"Why were the curtains open?" he asked suddenly. "Did you bribe a servant? Which one?"

The part of my mind that wasn't gibbering raced for something to tell him that wouldn't get Zev killed. "I – I – I don't – one of the elves, I don't know which one, they all look alike, I SWEAR I SWEAR I DON'T KNOW PLEASE DON'T!"

Howe laughed coldly and lowered his hammer. "They do all look alike, don't they? One wonders how they can even tell their men from their women."

"Maybe they can't," I giggled, the rush of relief from not losing another finger – yet – more intoxicating than a gallon of ale, and Howe seemed to like racist jokes so I went with that. "Everyone knows elves are gay."

Howe gave me an incredulous look, but before he could respond, there was a rattle of mailed feet on the stone floor and a guard entered the room. "My lord..." The guard glanced at me, paled, and averted his eyes. "Er, my lord, we've received word that Arl Eamon and his entourage are nearing the city and moving at speed. For some reason they have picked up the pace. The messenger rode his horse to death to get here quickly enough to warn you."

Rendon Howe let out a howl of pure frustration and hurled the hammer at the guard. The armored guard flinched but the hammer clanged harmlessly against his breastplate and fell to the floor. "Enough! Fetch Driden. And bring out one of the male slaves, I don't care which one. Go! Run!"

The guard pulled off a sloppy salute and then turned on his heel and jogged out of the room. Howe paced the room, muttering to himself; little clouds of flies buzzed up angrily as he disturbed their feasting on the reddish patches on the floor. My hand throbbed. I began to feel sick and closed my eyes, trying to think about something else. An image of Alistair in our room at Orzammar rose to the fore of my mind, and I threw myself into the sense memories we had formed there together, clinging to them with the desperate gratitude of a starving beggar clinging to a crust of bread.

Vaguely, I heard Howe talking to someone else, another man, explaining that he needed truth and didn't have time to extract it the usual way. The strange man responded dubiously, saying he would try but "Sometimes it's harder to do dwarves."

"Kill as many of the elves as you need to, I don't care," Howe said.

A squeal of terror jerked me back to the present and I opened my eyes to watch helplessly as a man in mage's robes, probably the Driden that Howe had called for, bent an elderly elven man backwards over a table and slashed his throat like a butchered nug. The struggling elf's squeal cut off into a gurgle and blood sprayed everywhere as he thrashed. The mage bared his teeth in a feral grin. He spread his arms and turned in a circle, glorying in the rain of blood. In the instant that the victim's heart stuttered to a stop, Driden spun to face me and flung out his bloody hands with a bark of "Obey!"

His magic hit me like a feather pillow moving at a thousand leagues an hour. There was pain, electric and all-consuming, and then nothing at all. The release from the pain was a pleasure in itself and I sagged in my chair. A voice seemed to speak in my head, a soft and soothing voice, reassuring me that I was safe as long as I obeyed. I could not even think of doing otherwise. It felt so good, and I'd been so scared.

Howe asked me question after question; I knew from the voice in my mind that I was supposed to answer, so I did, terrified that if I disobeyed, the voice that was keeping me safe would go away. I tried to be helpful, but I was getting tired. I had never been so tired.

"I must release her blood if you want to keep her alive," Driden warned. I tried to look at him but I couldn't lift my head. I could see the floor was littered with corpses, though, pale and drained of blood.

"It doesn't matter, I have what I need." Howe started to reach for a knife, then paused in thought. "Actually, no, keep her alive. She might be useful as a hostage if Alistair is difficult to control."

"Yes, my lord," Driden said, and everything went black.

* * *

I woke up later back in my cell and horribly thirsty. My right hand was chained to the wall again and felt very cold. My left hand... I whimpered and curled into a ball with it cradled against my chest. My brain felt like a bowlful of lumpy oatmeal and the cell's walls swam, lending the whole scene a nightmarish unreality. A faint, remembered echo of Driden's compelling voice still murmured _sleep... sleep.._. but something had woken me anyway.

Then I heard a drawn-out scream and a crash from down the hall in the direction of the torture chamber. With a sick feeling, I thought Howe must be having his cruel way with Leliana, but then there was the sound of running feet, a dreadful growl, and Norren the jailor crashed to the ground in front of my cell with Rocky tearing at his throat.

They tumbled across the floor with my dog savagely ripping out great chunks of flesh while Norren howled in mortal agony. Stumbling after him came Driden the blood mage, moving backwards with his hands extended towards his pursuer and emitting a protective shell. Then he slipped in a patch of blood, his concentration flickered, and blue light flared down the hall as Driden was struck down by the full force of Alistair's will. The terrible, implacable Warden strode into view, his sword drawn back for a killing blow. He was so soaked in gore that he seemed almost black in the torchlight, my knight in bloody armor, a sight so sweet it brought tears to my eyes.

The mage fell back and scrambled away on his hands. "Please, mercy," Driden begged.

Zevran darted out from a deeper shadow, there was a soft, silken sound, and Driden let out a sighing breath and collapsed, dead.

"No mercy for men like you," Zevran hissed.

I tried to call out to them, let them know they'd found me, but all I managed was a sort of croak, my throat was so dry. Alistair heard me anyway, though, and spun towards me, his whole body changing as he lowered his sword and shield and rage transformed into relief. "Oh, thank the Maker," he said in a choked voice. He dropped his sword on the wet stone floor and he took two steps to my cell door.

Zevran was already unlocking Leliana's cell with the keys taken off of Norren's corpse. "Here," he grunted when he was done and tossed the keyring at Alistair, then slipped inside. I heard Leliana make a pained sound and I was glad she was alive.

Alistair's hands were shaking and he couldn't find the right key, and I cleared my throat and managed to say, "The long brass one."

He found it and flung the door open to clang loudly against the wall. He crouched next to me and started working on unlocking the shackles. Rocky pushed past him and licked my chin once, then began to sniff me very carefully all over. His doggy breath felt warm and good. The shackle fell away from my wrist and Alistair gathered me to him, and I'd never been so glad to be surrounded by blood-soaked steel.

"I was so sure I'd be too late," he whispered.

"You came," I said. "Thank you."

"I am never ever _ever_ letting you out of my sight again." He hesitated as though dreading the answer before asking, "Are you okay?"

I wasn't sure and didn't want to talk about it. Whatever the mage had done, it had left me feeling like I'd been wrung out and hung up to dry. "Do you have any water?" I asked instead, enduring Rocky's attention while he groomed my ear.

"A little." Alistair fumbled for his water flask. "Oh. It's, uh, kind of gross, let me wipe the mouth off..." He managed to find a spot on his tunic's hem that was still its original blue and used it to clean the blood off of the flask's mouth before offering the water to me. "Not too fast," he cautioned me when I tried to gulp it down.

When I was done, still thirsty but a little more awake, Alistair leaned over to pick me up and noticed my broken hand. It looked pretty nasty since it had had time to swell up and turn purple. "Maker's breath! What – Okay." He took a deep breath and visibly calmed himself. There was no one to kill here. "Okay, I have elfroot, and we already sent a messenger to Wynne, she should be here soon. Let's get you out of here first, though. It might not be safe."

"Did you kill Howe?" I asked fiercely.

He shook his head. Zevran emerged from Leliana's cell with her in his arms, her face nestled against his throat, and we began making our way out of the dungeon. "He's not here. That's why I want to get out of here, he might come back."

I shivered at the thought and pressed my cheek against his breastplate, ignoring how sticky it was.

"Don't forget, we have one more maiden to rescue," Zevran said.

"Right," Alistair agreed.

We were walking through the dungeon and I was looking around wide-eyed at all the corpses my men had left in their wake, so it took me a minute before I thought to ask, "Who? Morrigan?"

"No, Morrigan came and told us what happened," Alistair said.

I lifted my head and asked urgently, "She's alive?"

"Totally exhausted, but yes, alive," he said. "I left her with Eamon to ride in his carriage and came here on horseback with Rocky running along as fast as we could."

"Imagine my surprise when I saw your large Warden and his canine companion approaching," Zevran said, "just as I was myself considering how best to infiltrate the place. Erlina had procured some uniforms, you see – Erlina is the lovely girl who allowed us our chance at Loghain. Apparently, Rendon Howe took the Queen into his questionable custody immediately after the assassination, and Erlina was concerned for her mistress' safety. She begged me for help. Considering I had a reasonable suspicion that he had captured you as well, I agreed, and she helped us sneak in under disguise."

"You ended up fighting anyway," I said.

"Yes, well, I'm not very good at the stealth thing," Alistair said a bit sheepishly. Once we had cleared the stairs, he glanced nervously around us and asked, "Do you think you can walk now that we're past the stairs? I'd like to have my sword arm free if we meet any more of Howe's little friends."

I nodded and he set me down gently. My head pounded and my knees felt like jelly but I was able to follow him through Howe's house to a very thoroughly locked door. A red-haired elven serving girl with hard, slanted eyes stood wringing her hands beside it and babbled in a thick Orlesian accent about how we had to hurry.

"Got it," Alistair said, and started to flip through the ring of keys again, but Zevran bumped his elbow – Zev's arms were still full of Leliana – and said, "Not just yet."

"What?" exclaimed a cultured, feminine voice from inside the room. "I am your Queen! Release me at once!"

"Forgive me, your majesty," Zevran replied, "but we have committed a number of crimes against the laws of Ferelden in order to save your royal person. Breaking and entering, murder, that sort of thing."

"You have my full pardon," she said at once. "Just as soon as I am returned to my position, I shall have the paperwork drafted."

"The Landsmeet," I said, cottoning on to Zevran's plan.

"What about it?" Queen Anora sounded suspicious.

Alistair's eyes widened with excitement. "Yes! My Queen, Ferelden desperately needs your support against the Blight. Please support the Gray Wardens at the Landsmeet."

"I can hardly refuse," she snapped. "Very well, you have my word as a monarch that I will support and ally myself with you and your cause. Now release me at once. You are holding me hostage!"

He winced, clearly stung by her accusation, and made an effort to sound more respectful. "You're right. That wasn't the way to start a friendship, but our options are pretty limited. I apologize, my Queen, and thank you for your promise of aid."

He unlocked the door and the Queen stepped out, still wearing the nightgown she must have had on when Howe kidnapped her. Nonetheless, she was still every inch a Queen when she commanded, "Let us go, now. Rendon Howe must be stopped, but first we must retire to someplace more secure."

"He used a blood mage," Alistair told her, and the implication was clear; there might be others in Denerim who had been influenced by subtle magics. "It might be safer for you to come with us to Eamon's rather than return to the palace."

She nodded her agreement and we headed for the door. Erlina dashed into a bedroom at one point and came back out with a cape for her Queen to wear. There didn't seem to be anyone else in the house; in retrospect, the ease which which we were making our escape should have set off some warning bells in our heads, but at the time we were in too much of a hurry to notice.

The front door was flung open just as we entered the main hall, revealing a tall woman in full armor with her dark hair pulled tightly back from a face that was filled with anger and, behind the anger, a deep, personal injury. Four soldiers flanked her on each side and four archers entered with arrows trained mostly on Alistair and Rocky, the most obvious threats. Rocky crouched and let out a low, rumbling growl. Ignoring him, the tall woman commanded, "Halt! You are under arrest for the murder of the Regent, Teyrn Loghain Mac Tir."

"This is ridiculous," Queen Anora snapped. She pushed past Alistair and stood straight and regal in her borrowed cape, while the soldiers gasped and the arrows wavered, unwilling to aim near the Queen. "Ser Cauthrien, these people have rescued me from the real villain in this play. Rendon Howe has manipulated us all. He is my father's true killer!"

I stared at Anora, impressed by how quickly her mind moved. She was already working hard to help us. Did she mean "killer" in a metaphorical way, meaning that Howe had been responsible for the circumstances leading up to his death, or was she saying that Howe had literally held the knife? Did she genuinely believe that Howe had done it, or was she just using the opportunity to turn blame towards him and away from her new allies?

Either way, Anora's statement had an immediate effect on Cauthrien, who rocked back on her heels as though she had been punched. "Arl Howe? But Teyrn Loghain trusted him – they were friends!"

"So did the Couslands," Anora said. "You have heard the dark rumors about the Howes' assumption of their teyrnir. And why should Rendon have been in my father's private chambers at that hour? He had no appointment, and it was not normal for my father to receive visitors in his bedroom, especially not Rendon, of all people."

Cauthrien's eyes flickered uncertainly and I began to hope that the clever Queen might save us all. "I did have doubts... I did wonder what he was doing there. I would have expected the Teyrn's maid to find him first. But there was the arrow, and the broken glass."

Anora gave a small huff that managed to convey all the disdain of a full on eye-roll. "Ser Cauthrien, it is not impossible for a man of Rendon's means to procure whatever arrows he likes, and windows are not hard to break. Enough of this nonsense. Convey me to Arl Eamon's estate at once. I have had enough of this indignity."

"Arl Eamon's – but, your majesty, Eamon is to be arrested for treasonous conspiracy against the Regent," Cauthrien objected. "Arl Howe gave the order for him to be apprehended and brought before the Landsmeet in chains."

I sucked in my breath in sudden worry. If Eamon were arrested, Morrigan might be caught and given to the templars if she were too exhausted to escape. But Anora picked up on something else, something dire.

"Landsmeet?" she said sharply. "He cannot be at the Landsmeet. It has been called for, yes, but is not yet in session. Arl Eamon is not here yet, he could not have brought it into session."

"Arl Howe brought it into session himself, your majesty," Cauthrien said. "As you know, with Loghain dead, he is the most powerful nobleman in the nation and he has that right. The rest of the nobility was already assembled in the city as a result of Arl Eamon's call, so the Landsmeet was able to begin almost immediately."

"They cannot cast a legal vote without Arl Eamon's presence... But if Eamon is imprisoned under suspicion of treason, then that stipulation could be waived," Anora said as though thinking aloud. Her pretty face hardened and she turned on her heel, her cape flaring out around her, to tell us, "Arl Howe intends to set himself up as King, I am sure of it. I must go to the Palace at once and stop him."

"I will escort and protect you, my Queen," Ser Cauthrien said with a deep bow.

"Us too," I said.

"No," Alistair said immediately. "We're taking you to Eamon's where it's safe and we're going to put some elfroot on that hand and wait for Wynne."

"But-"

"Ah," Cauthrien said delicately, "with all due respect, Wardens, your appearance is rather... alarming at the moment, and there is a standing order out for your arrest. Should you attempt to brave the Palace, you will have to stop and argue your way past every guard, and you're as likely as not to find yourself in Fort Drakon."

"I _must_ go at once," Anora repeated. "Time is of the essence. Howe has had hours to slander myself and Eamon, and a vote may be called at any moment. Wardens, I shall do my utmost to support you in your cause, for the Blight indeed threatens us all, but at the moment I do not have time to baby-sit you past guard after guard. Go now and seek safety within Eamon's walls. You have my thanks."

With that, she turned and swept from the room, with Erlina trotting along in her wake like a well-groomed toy dog and all of Cauthrien's soldiers filing neatly behind her.

"Alistair," I said, feeling an odd sort of disappointment, "We worked for so long to get everything ready for this Landsmeet! How can we just not go?"

"Easily," Zevran said from where he had knelt to let Leliana's weight rest on the ground and spare his arms. She was awake, but very pale, and she did not return my smile at seeing her eyes open. "We simply get into a carriage and seek a bath and a warm bed at Eamon's palatial estate. I, for one, find this a welcome alternative to a stuffy meeting filled with foolish and short-sighted nobles."

"I'm going to bite all of my fingernails off from waiting," I complained, then scowled up at Alistair. "How can you be so calm?"

He finally looked down at me directly, and I caught my breath at the intensity of his gaze. "I'm not calm. At all. Do you have any idea how – how scared, and angry, and –" He stopped and looked away, clenching his jaw.

I took his hand and squeezed it tight to stop it trembling. I wanted to apologize, but _I'm sorry_ seemed neither adequate nor appropriate, so instead I let him hold me close and bury his face in my hair, and pretended I didn't know he was crying.


	71. Resolutions

_As always, deepest thanks to all of you. You turned this story from an amusing waste of time into a worthwhile project that really means a lot to me. Special thanks to mille libri, elite betatrix, for making me tie the knots and fill in the holes._

* * *

The guest rooms at Eamon's Denerim estate were even bigger and fancier than the ones at Redcliffe. I supposed that this place had been built for comfort, whereas Redcliffe had been built for defensibility and longevity. We were ushered into a guest room and Alistair sat me down on a trunk at the foot of the bed. He sat next to me and scooped some of Morrigan's elfroot ointment out into his palm, then sat biting his lip as he tried to dab it onto my crushed fingers without actually touching them. It wasn't working, and the way he kept wincing and turning pale was just making it harder for me not to think about what had happened to me. I wanted him to finish and wrap my hand up so I wouldn't have to look at it anymore.

Zevran slipped into the room, insinuated himself between us and sat down on Alistair's lap. Alistair stared at him helplessly, unable to shove him off without bumping into me. "Allow me," the rogue said to him with an outrageous smirk. Zev's deft fingers made short work of the necessary first aid and soon my broken fingers were splinted and wrapped snugly to reduce the swelling.

"Thank you," Alistair said, thoroughly relieved that someone with smaller hands had taken over.

"Anytime your lap is cold, I am happy to-"

"I meant for the first aid!" Alistair's ears turned pink as Zevran backed away, laughing.

"How's Leliana?" I asked him.

His laughter faded. "Resting. She will feel much better after a hot meal and some tea, I am sure. The wound in her leg is already gone; Morrigan's cure-all is a marvelous thing. With luck, both you lovely ladies will be good as new before Wynne even gets here from the Tower."

"Rest and food and tea all sound good," I said, and Alistair immediately jumped up to get some food.

I managed a couple of biscuits and a great deal of very sweet tea before I conked out on the bed. The absurd piece of furniture was so tall, it had its own little step-stool to climb into it, and when I curled up on it I sank so deep in pillows I could barely see out. I was warm, the pain was being numbed by the elfroot, I could hear Alistair in the adjoining room scrubbing the blood out from under his fingernails, and Rocky was curled up against my legs; in other words, it was paradise.

Some time later, the bed shifted under Alistair's weight and woke me up. "Mmmf," I complained, curling into a tighter ball deep in the fluffy bedding.

"Sorry." He rested a warm hand on my shoulder and his lips brushed my ear. "I wanted to let you sleep, but Morrigan says you need to eat more than just biscuits. Actually, what she said was that you should eat a whole raw rabbit, but I think she was joking."

"She's here?" A wash of relief passed over me that she was safe.

"She got here a couple of hours ago. Eamon got captured, though, and brought to the Landsmeet." Alistair leaned over a little to look at my hand; I moved it a few inches under a pillow so he couldn't see it. "Oghren got brought in with him, but they thought Morrigan was a dog and let her go."

"Oghren was with you?" Indignant, I uncurled myself enough to glare up at him. "Why didn't he come with you and help?"

Alistair chuckled at the memory. "We couldn't get him to stay on the horse. It was like trying to balance an egg on its end." Then the smile died on his face and he reached out to brush my hair back from my cheek, revealing bruises left from Howe's knuckles that I'd forgotten to tell him about. I looked away, self-conscious, and he sighed and stretched out on the bed next to me. "I wasn't laughing at the time, though," he said, much more quietly. "Maybe I should have been more patient, but it felt like every second I wasted might... might be the second that made me too late." He rolled onto his side and curled around me, holding me very carefully as though I might break.

I pulled his arms more tightly around me and snuggled back against his chest. Sometimes being with a man so much bigger than me was awkward, but right then I relished the strength and solidity of his body encircling mine. "You weren't too late. And you didn't need Oghren anyway. You kicked arse."

"Zev helped," Alistair admitted.

"You two made a good team."

"Huh." He hesitated for a moment, remembering. "He fights like you. I guess I just fought the same way I would have if it had been you at my back instead of him."

"Mm." I was _seriously_ warm and comfortable. In fact, I was making plans to never move again, ever, but my stomach had other ideas and growled loudly. I sighed in resignation. "So. I heard talk of food?"

"Yeah, there's roast chicken in the kitchen if you want that, or we can ask the cook to make something." Alistair reluctantly extricated himself and got up. Suddenly his face brightened. "Maker, I got all sidetracked and almost forgot to tell you. There's someone here you should meet."

The suppressed excitement in his voice got me to sit up despite the allure of the soft pillows. "Who?"

Alistair helped me out of the mountainous bed. "Can you believe there was another Gray Warden in Howe's dungeon? He says he escaped while I was making a scene, and followed us here after we left. His name is Riordan and he's from the Orlesian wardens."

"That's awesome," I said. "Is anyone else coming to help, too?"

A shadow briefly crossed his face. "Apparently Loghain sent them back at the border. Some nonsense about them traveling with chevaliers – he thought they were invading, I guess. Riordan snuck in to see what the situation was."

"Figures. Well, let's go meet this Warden. I doubt he will live up to the standard I've come to expect from male Wardens, though." I smiled at Alistair and stretched up to kiss his blushing cheek. Then I pulled on my boots, moving awkwardly with only one hand.

"Does that still hurt?" he asked with a frown, touching the bandaged hand.

"Yeah."

"It shouldn't."

"Well, it does."

He bent to tie my boot laces for me. "Wynne should be here soon, and in the meantime we can ask Morrigan. She might have some better herbs."

I grimaced at the thought of unwrapping my hand and having it poked and prodded. Aside from not wanting to have to look at it, Morrigan wasn't exactly the gentlest nurse, being more likely to tell a screaming patient to hold still and stop being such a pussy. "It's fine. Let's go see the new guy."

Alistair gave me a dubious look, but let the issue lie for now. He led me down a hallway to a different guest suite and knocked on the door to Riordan's room. "It's me and Latitia," he said through the door.

"Ah, good," a male voice with a light Orlesian accent said, and the door swung open to reveal a long, lean man with very bright gray eyes in a weathered face. "Wonderful to see you again, my lady, and under such improved circumstances."

"Oh!" I cried in delight. "You're the guy who made fun of the guards! Well done, ser."

"Escaping was child's play. With the guards dead, there was no one to stop me from picking the clumsy excuse for a lock on my door." Riordan stood up and bent to kiss my right hand with courtly grace. "Now that you have joined us, perhaps we can discuss plans for dealing with this Blight before it gets out of control."

"I'm not sure what we can discuss until the Landsmeet is over," I said, taking a seat across from where Riordan had been sitting. A lunch of sandwiches had been set out on a small table in the center of the sitting area and I picked up the one with the most beef. Alistair took a seat, too, and grabbed a cheese sandwich.

"Ah yes," Riordan frowned. "Alistair explained that to me. How long do you expect it to go on?"

"No clue." I shrugged.

The Orlesian Warden smiled and stretched out in his chair with one leg cocked up over the armrest. "Then we shall be forced to spend this time in pleasant conversation. Such a pity."

Riordan had a quick wit and a collection of anecdotes about Duncan that had Alistair hanging on his every word. It seemed that the brave commander of the Ferelden wardens had been a bit of a bad boy in his youth, and I thought I understood better what Duncan had seen in me when he conscripted me.

"Of course, once Duncan moved into Ferelden permanently, traveling to see him became a bit more challenging," he concluded. "The border guards are always so concerned about the Bards."

"Bards!" I exclaimed, suddenly ashamed of myself for forgetting to check on Leliana. "Alistair, where's Leliana? We should go see how she's doing."

"Okay." Alistair tore himself away from his fellow Warden with obvious regret, which brought an amused twinkle into Riordan's gray eyes. "We'll be back in a bit, Riordan."

"By all means, attend to your comrade," the older man said.

Leliana was reclining on a sofa in the library with a book in her lap and a cup of tea on the sideboard. She looked up as we entered, her eyes lingering for a moment on my still-bandaged hand. I had thought about removing the bandage but changed my mind; I didn't really want to see what lay beneath. Alistair and I sat on another sofa across from her, and I smiled at her and asked, "How are you doing? You look good!"

She placed a handkerchief into the book to hold her place and laid it in her lap. "I feel surprisingly well, actually. I've had a wonderful bath and a change of clothes, and a real supper with actual spices."

"Hey," Alistair said. "Pepper is a spice."

"Yes, but you Fereldens use it as a main ingredient," Leliana teased. "How about you two? Are you both well?"

I shrugged. "I'm better than I have any right to expect."

Alistair rolled his shoulders, wincing. "I'm gonna be sore for a couple days, but that's life. I was incredibly lucky."

"We all were," she murmured.

Appetized by Leliana's mention of spices, I was about to suggest we scrounge some dinner together when a distant door slammed and we heard raised voices. We looked at each other, then rose and went out into the main hallway to see what was happening.

Just coming in through the front entrance was Arl Eamon, carrying a bloodied greatsword in one hand and pressing the other over a gash on his hip. Beside him Oghren stumped along glowering belligerently at anyone who dared meet his gaze; his battleaxe looked like it, too, had seen recent use. Striding along after them came the Queen, her blue eyes blazing with cool fury and her silk gown spattered with bright blood, and behind _her_ came three men I didn't know. Their clothing screamed "noble" but their weaponry shouted "warrior" just as loudly, and they kept casting glances over their shoulders as though they expected to be pursued.

Eamon's gaze landed on me and he almost managed to smile through his grimace of pain. "Ah, Warden Latitia, I am so glad you're all right."

"Alistair ground the entire household into dog meat," I said, taking Alistair's arm. "Uh... I take it the Landsmeet didn't go well?"

"No it did not," Anora snapped. "That little weasel spreads lies faster than a rat spreads plague. And he is impatient. As soon as he thought he had enough support to win, he forced a vote – but he had only a simple majority, not enough to actually grant him the throne. When he realized his blunder, he attacked me! Actually attacked _me_! Does the man have no scruples?"

"At that point the Landsmeet dissolved into a barroom brawl," Eamon said with disgust. "Were it not for your stalwart ally here, things might have gone a good deal worse for us."

Oghren belched by way of acknowledgment. "First int'resting thing that's happened all week."

"We have much to discuss," Eamon continued, "but if you will excuse me, I need to avail myself of a healer."

"Morrigan's here somewhere," I offered. "She's the best."

"Naturally," her musical voice emanated from a shadowed doorway where she must have stood to watch the scene. She stepped out into the hall and the lamplight shone on her glorious hair and the skin so casually exposed by her Chasind robe. "Take off your trousers and we shall see what is to be done."

"Er..." Eamon was actually speechless for once at being blandly ordered to strip in front of the Queen of Ferelden.

Morrigan's lips curved into a smirk. "In your room, of course. Unless you are uncomfortable disrobing in front of me alone. Do you require a chaperone?"

"Your friends have told me some amazing stories about your healing prowess. I'm sure you will be very professional," the outmatched man said, limping away towards his own rooms.

"Yeah, but will you?" Oghren said with a coarse laugh.

Morrigan shot Oghren a disgusted look, then turned to saunter after Eamon. Over her shoulder, she called, "And you, Wardens, I want to have a look at you when this is done. I require you both... functional."

"Yes, ma'am," I said glumly.

Anora cleared her throat and the men in the room stopped grinning and nudging each other. "If we are done amusing ourselves," she said tartly, "perhaps we can return to the problem at hand. Howe's supporters are rabid in his defense, far beyond anything we could have expected."

"I have to get back to my lands," said a gruff-voiced man with graying hair and scarred hands, who held his short sword like he knew how to use it. "This political farce may already have cost me the lives of my last remaining freeholders and soldiers."

"Understood, Arl Wulff," Anora said. "Indeed, I think it would be wise of us all to evacuate from Denerim. We must consolidate our power at once in case Howe moves against us in force. Only from a place of security can we negotiate effectively with the remaining Banns to gain their support."

"Um," I put in, hesitant in the presence of all these warlike nobles. Their heads turned towards me in mild surprise that I'd interrupted. "Um, you should know that the dwarven warriors that my King sent will be going to Redcliffe. Same goes for the elves, if they got our message."

Anora nodded. "Redcliffe is well fortified and its men were spared from decimation at Ostagar. Its defenses may be the most secure in Ferelden, especially with those dwarven reinforcements. It's close to your lands, Wulff, and yours as well, Arl Bryland."

A redheaded man in particularly fine clothing nodded, and I decided he must be Bryland.

"Dragon's Peak is in fairly good shape," said the third stranger, a tall man with a thick blond beard. "I can leave my lands under the command of my seneschal and accompany you, my Queen."

"Thank you, Sighard," Anora smiled warmly at him.

"Wait," Bryland said suddenly. "That's the same Alistair that Eamon wanted to put on the throne."

"The one who put Howe's torturers to the sword," Sighard said with grim satisfaction. He strode forward and held out his hand to Alistair, who shook it for lack of anything better to do. "My son owes you his life."

Alistair was looking rather less impressive than usual, dressed only in travel-worn tunic and trousers while the poor laundress was washing the blood out of his armor, and with his hair still damp from his bath. The trapped look in his eyes wasn't helping him look like a prince, either. "I'm glad to help, my lord," he said. Then his face hardened, and suddenly he looked a lot more like a potential king. "I just wish Howe had been home when I knocked on his door."

"Aye, so do we all," Sighard spat.

Eamon came walking back into the foyer with no trace of a limp and a wide smile on his face. "That was marvelous. Leg's as good as new. I wish we had a hundred more healers like her, I know many men who wouldn't have died if she'd been there. Now, back to business. I see you've met Alistair, King Maric's son."

The banns nodded. Anora's back stiffened at the mention of Alistair's parentage, while Alistair's shoulders slumped just a bit.

Eamon continued smoothly. "In that case, I believe we should discuss what we should call him. We cannot formally crown him without the support of a full majority of the bannorn, but of course, King Maric was acknowledged as such throughout the rebellion despite the lack of a Landsmeet vote. It would be fitting, I think, to call him King even without-"

"Excuse me," Bryland cut him off. "I think you've gotten the wrong impression. We're all here because we fought to defend our Queen, not because we mean to depose her and replace her with this young man."

Wulff agreed. "Gray Warden Alistair should serve his nation in that capacity. It's the Blight that is the real threat, not the lack of a King. No offense, my boy, but you're hardly prepared for the task of leading our nation through this crisis."

Alistair shook his head emphatically. "No offense taken. You're absolutely right. I don't know the first thing about kinging."

"Then allow me to suggest you stick to Gray Wardening," Anora said dryly. "Do you renounce your claim to the throne, for yourself and all your descendents?"

"You don't have to do that," Eamon put in.

"No, I'm happy to," Alistair said. He glanced down at me, then squared his shoulders as he took control of his own life for the first time. "I never wanted it, and Anora does. If you all support her and trust her to lead, that's all lot more important than the fact that my father dallied with a serving woman one night. I'll stick to what I'm good at: killing darkspawn. So, yes, I renounce my claim."

Eamon gave him a hard look, then sighed and turned to Anora. He went down on one knee before her, a motion that was immediately copied by the other nobles. "Then I swear allegiance to you, your majesty. Long live Queen Anora, sole and sovereign ruler of Ferelden."

I heard a muffled squeal from the doorway behind us and knew that Leliana was already re-writing the dialogue in her head to fit into verse. Hope was surging in my chest, too, despite my best efforts, and I took Alistair's hand and squeezed it tightly. His big hand closed over mine, and nothing more needed to be said.


	72. Brace for Impact

We left Denerim within the hour. Our caravan was immense; Bann Sighard refused to leave any of his people behind, not even the meanest servant, saying that Howe was certain to capture and "interrogate" anyone left behind. Once he'd said that, there'd been an uncomfortable silence, and then the other lords had agreed to do the same. While the lords were gathering their people and packing their necessities in a frantic race to get out of the city before Howe could consolidate enough military power to successfully try to stop us, Riordan disappeared for about half an hour; when he came back, he was loaded down like a walking armory.

"Here you go, my friends," he said with a broad grin as he came into the room I shared with Alistair. He dumped his load on the bed with a tremendous clatter. "Satinalia has come early."

"Where did you get all of this?" I demanded, hopping up to kneel on the bed and dig through his goods. Alistair was shaving, and nearly lopped off his nose as he craned his neck to see what was happening and finish shaving at the same time.

"There is a Gray Warden vault nearby in the market district, and I was able to pay it a call. Our need is dire, so, as senior Warden, I believe we should take anything we can use and sell everything else. Wardens Alistair and Latitia, do you concur?" Riordan said this with a grave voice and an absolutely straight face.

I pursed my lips and pretended to think it over. "Yes, ser, I believe we do."

"Excellent. Then rummage through, pick out whatever you like, and we'll sell the rest as soon as we find a good market. This, however," he leaned over and picked up the big shield that was the centerpiece of his find, "is not for selling. Alistair, when you finish your beautification, I have something I think you might like."

Alistair hurriedly splashed water over his face and came over, a towel still draped over his shoulders. "What's this – oh." His face went very still, and he reached out with reverent hands to take the shield. "It's... Duncan's shield, isn't it. You're not – are you really _giving_ it to me, or...?"

Riordan's bright eyes softened and he laid a weathered hand on Alistair's shoulder, giving it a squeeze. "Yes, brother. He would want you to have it. It's a fine shield, both stronger and lighter than the one you have now. Use it well."

"I will." Alistair's eyes suddenly brimmed with tears, and he blinked them rapidly, his ears reddening with embarrassment. "Thank you, brother." He smiled through his tears. "It feels good to have someone to call _brother_ again."

Most of the arms and armor Riordan had brought weren't of a kind we knew how to use, but I was able to replace my own daggers, which had been re-edged so many times that they were getting brittle, and I managed to convince Oghren that carrying a handaxe as a backup weapon for close quarters would not make him less of a man. The axe was gorgeous dwarven work and I would _not_ see it sitting in some random surface merchant booth.

Soon after that, the lords returned with their entourages, guards, and wagons, and we made our escape. Our allies poured out through the northern city gate in such numbers that the comparatively small contingent of city soldiers sent to stop us were simply ignored, left to stand impotently waving their arrest warrants at our backs as we left the now-hostile capital behind.

Riding in Eamon's carriage, I leaned out the window to look back at the line of wagons and individuals plodding behind us, curved out along a road churned into ankle-deep mud under a weeping sky. I couldn't wrap my brain around how many people had come from Eamon's estate alone. More than a hundred souls, including guards, had been living under-stairs where they would not intrude their common selves upon the nobleman and his guests. Arl Wulff hadn't had as many with him, since he didn't keep an estate in the city, but the courtly Arl Bryland more than made up for Wulff's lack with his own lavish entourage.

But what really made the nobles seem like... like people who could not _possibly _deserve to be so vastly elevated over so many was not their vast numbers of servants, but the fact that those servants, warmly clothed and well fed, were walking past rows and rows of ragged, hopeless refugees. Citizens all, but rendered homeless and destitute by the blight, turned back from the overflowing city to make their pitiful camps outside its walls. Dull-eyed families watched the procession with indifference, or came out to beg for food in a place where coin had lost its meaning. No amount of gold would buy a loaf of bread if there was none to be bought, and the local food supplies were exhausted.

"I can't believe how many people there are in Ferelden," I said, finally settling back into my seat. "It's so much bigger than Orzammar. Look at all those people out there!"

"And those are just the ones who survived to flee," Zevran said. His favorite knife made a soft _thip – thip_ sound against the leather strop as his hands flickered back and forth with it.

"How much of Ferelden's farming country has been destroyed?" Riordan seemed like he could have used another several days to rest and eat, but his gray eyes were alert as he looked at Eamon.

The arl shook his head. "A very great deal. As Arl Wulff said, the south is lost. Even now, we travel the north road to avoid the Bannorn. The archdemon has become a good deal more aggressive of late and seems to be focusing its attacks on the heartland, so that area of Ferelden is simply too dangerous to travel through."

I frowned. "Why? Those are just farms. What does it care?"

"What does the archdemon ever care about?" Riordan shrugged. "We have never been able to divine its desires, aside from simple destruction. Perhaps it attacks the Bannorn because it is divided, making each individual bann weak and easily crushed. And, of course, it must feed its horde. The Bannorn is rich with livestock."

"You make it sound like it's smart," Alistair said. He was fidgeting with the straps on Duncan's shield, adjusting them to fit his own, somewhat longer arm.

Riordan leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. "You must remember, the archdemon isn't merely a beast. It's a god, or it was. It speaks and it's more than capable of coming up with a plan and then executing it. They each have their own personalities as well, or something like it. It's my theory that Toth, dragon of fire, attacked the nations with the hottest weather simply because he didn't like the cold."

"Really?" I wrinkled my nose as I tried to imagine the archdemon having a personality. A mental image of the great monster lounging on a blanket in the sun presented itself; I dismissed it before I started to giggle. This was serious. "Wait – they have names? Who are we fighting this time?"

Riordan's eyes sparkled with irony. "The dragon of beauty. Urthemiel. And yet it chose to invade the Wilds, a vast swamp! Truly, no one can know the mind of a god."

"Do you have a guess as to where it will go next?" My stomach gave a little shiver at the thought of confronting a real dragon. I remembered the mighty dragon of Haven shaking the earth with her roar and uprooting whole trees in her efforts to get at Bodahn's mules. And we were supposed to _kill_ something that big?

He sighed and leaned back, stretching his long legs in front of him. "I cannot say. No one has even seen it yet. It may still be in the Wilds, or it may never have been there at all."

We were hampered by the soft servants whose feet were unused to forced marching in the mud. They were doing all right now, but needed frequent breaks, and would soon be entirely exhausted. Anora soon had the idea of buying some of the refugees' wagons and oxen, and they were pitifully eager to sell in exchange for food and supplies. There might have been more oxen available, but a few suspicious piles of bones hinted that some had fallen victim to necessity. With the servants loaded into the wagons, we made better time and continued on into the night, needing to put space between ourselves and the city. Finally we had to make a quick camp to feed everyone and rest the animals, but at dawn we were off again, plodding along at the pace of the patient oxen.

Wynne intercepted us that morning, coming the opposite direction along the same highway in response to Alistair's message. She was accompanied by a pair of Templars, either to protect her or to contain her, maybe both. I was walking beside an ox, holding its lead and enjoying the feeling of controlling a beast ten times my size, even though in truth the creature was just following the wagon in front of it. Alistair was out in front with the horse-drawn carriage that contained the nobility, and he brought Wynne back to me.

"Hello, my dear," the healer said with a warm smile. "I hear we had a spot of bother with the local leadership."

"You could say that." I looked at her warily; I knew what was coming next.

Sure enough, she said, "Why don't we go sit at the side of the road and take a look at that hand? I'm sure we shall have no trouble catching up when we're done, and a bouncing carriage is no place to perform any kind of delicate work."

"You can leave her with us," Alistair said to the templars, meaning Wynne. One of them opened his mouth as though to protest. Alistair just stood there and waited. At first glance, he looked young and shabby next to the shining templars, but every scratch and ding on his armor spoke of another battle he'd survived, and the leather of his sword hilt was shiny from use, the twisted wire worn down where his thumb gripped it. He stood with the stillness of someone perfectly comfortable in their own body, and perfectly in control of every muscle.

The templar changed his mind. "As you wish, Warden. I remand her to your custody."

We sat on an old mile marker that had fallen sideways and become a convenient bench for weary travelers. Wynne took my hand into her lap and unwrapped the dusty bandages, dropping them to the ground beside her; under the bandages, the skin looked pink and healthy, the elfroot having healed all the bruising, but the joints looked swollen and I turned my face away rather than look too long. Wynne pressed the hand flat between her palms and closed her eyes. I didn't feel anything, but after a moment she opened her eyes and began to flex my fingers, one joint at a time. The first and second finger were stiff and sore, making me screw up my face with the effort of staying still. When she got to my thumb, it wouldn't bend at all, and I cried out and jerked my hand away. "Ow! Stop it!"

"I wish I'd been with you," she said. "You should have brought me along if you were attempting something dangerous."

"I didn't want anyone thinking your tower was involved," I said, nursing my hand and trying not to sulk. Alistair rubbed a sympathetic hand up and down my back, and I leaned on him a little. "I know, I should have brought more people. Or not done it at all. Hindsight's a bitch."

"I need your hand back, please," she said. Reluctantly, I held it out to her, and she took my hand in one of hers and gripped my thumb in the other. "Hold still, now. This will just take a moment."

Her voice was unusually gentle and that made me suspicious. I tried to pull away a little, and when she didn't let go, I asked in a quavering voice, "What are you going to do?"

She bit her lip, and I saw her consider lying and then reluctantly change her mind. "The elfroot knitted the crushed bones too quickly and clumsily. Most of the fractured pieces are close enough to their natural positions that I can work with them, move them back into position, but the thumb is badly misaligned. It needs to be re-broken before I can-"

"NO!" I threw myself away from her, stumbled over Alistair's legs and fell on my arse in the mud. I scooted backwards until my back hit a tree trunk, hugging my hand against my chest. "No, no, you're not doing that! No way! You don't have to, it's fine. I'm fine."

Alistair followed me, worry written all over his face, and took my elbow to help me to my feet. "Hey, it's okay. This is Wynne. She's not going to hurt you."

"She wants to break my sodding _thumb_!" I shouted at him and pulled my arm out of his grasp, feeling my cheeks flush and tears sting my eyes. "That counts as hurting to me!"

Wynne was still sitting on the bench, trying to look unintimidating. "I would use magic, it would all be over in a moment, and then I can heal it properly. You'll hardly even know it's happening."

"No. Absolutely not."

She frowned. "Latitia, be reasonable. You need your thumb. If you don't let me take care of it, you will never be able to bend it again. Come now, it isn't like you to be afraid of a little pain."

"I'm done talking about this." I turned and started after the wagon train at a brisk walk. I might have broken into a run to get away faster, but didn't trust my shaking legs to hold me up if I did. Behind me, I could hear Wynne urging Alistair to make me come back, and Alistair's flat refusal to _make_ me do anything.

The thing was, Wynne was totally right, and I knew it. This wasn't even the first time I'd had a bone re-broken. Rica hadn't always been as good as she was now at setting bones correctly the first time, and I could still feel the small bump on the outside my right forearm to prove it. Tentatively, I stroked the base of my thumb with the fingers of the other hand, feeling the crooked shape of the bone beneath the skin.

Nausea rolled over me in a chill wave and I staggered to a stop, crouched down and bent my head over my knees, breathing hard through my nose until it passed. I swallowed, wiped the cold sweat off my forehead with my sleeve and started to stand up. Then I thought about offering my hand to Wynne, submitting to her, holding still while she broke it, and I puked. Hard. I was bent over with my hands braced on my knees, coughing and shuddering and generally being a total wreck, when the ground before me rippled, became mud for a moment, and then smoothed out into clean dirt.

"That's better," Wynne said from a few steps behind me. I straightened and spun to face her, and she held out her flask to me. "Water?"

I took it silently, and rinsed and spat until I felt dwarven again. I wiped the mouth of the flask, stoppered it and handed it back. "Thanks."

"Of course."

We started walking slowly after the wagon train together, a few feet apart. I could hear Alistair's armor rattle a ways behind us but he must have been told to give us privacy because he didn't come closer. Shame made me keep my head down and my mouth shut, so it was Wynne who spoke next.

"How much has Alistair told you of Templar abilities?"

"Some." I frowned in thought. "Mostly he just drains mana. And he can do that blasting thing like he did at Zathrian. But he's not fully trained. I take it there's more?"

"Much." Her voice gained a tight edge, and I glanced at her to see the lines around her eyes deepen. "A Templar, a fully trained and sanctioned Templar, can drain a mage so thoroughly as to incapacitate her. Render her helpless and unable to move."

My mind jumped to the inevitable result of men trained to think of the people under their power as beings less than human, not deserving of respect, and I drew in a harsh breath. "Oh, Wynne."

"The Chantry pretends it doesn't happen, of course," Wynne said. "And it is not encouraged for mages to copulate, or be copulated with, lest we reproduce." She spoke the clinical words with deep bitterness. "But there will always be... bullies. Men, and women too, who enjoy having someone helpless before them. Suffice it to say, my dear, that you are not the first woman I've treated who didn't want me to touch them. It's all right. There's nothing to be ashamed of."

Tears sprang into my eyes again and my throat clamped shut. I nodded mutely.

She watched me as she asked, "You do understand why I want to do this? You agree that it's necessary?"

I nodded again. Cold shivers began in my belly.

"Shall we try again? We can wait a little if you need time, but every hour that passes will only make it worse," she said gently.

"Okay," I said, which was a mistake. I should have just nodded once more. As soon as I had opened my mouth, I could no longer stop the sobs pouring out along with the words, and once they started they wouldn't stop. We went to a nearby patch of grass, having walked a long way from the original bench by now, and I sat cross-legged in front of her and tried and _tried_ to hold out my hand.

"Whenever you're ready," she said.

"I can't," I blurted out and curled my knees up to my chest, covering my folded arms. "I can't do it. I can't. I'm sorry."

Alistair caught up to us then and knelt beside me, gathering me up like a child. I wished that he weren't wearing his armor, so I could bury my face in his warmth, but the sweat-and-rust smell of it was a comfort of its own. Okay, yes, I had complained about it before, and it could get pretty rank sometimes after a day in the sun, but what it _meant_ was safety, protection. My tears glittered on the burnished steel and turned it chilly against my cheek.

"Just don't look," he suggested. "Pretend nothing's happening."

A stifled whimper was the only sound I could make, but I moved my head in a tiny, shaky affirmative. He wrapped one big hand over my head to cover my eyes and the ear that wasn't pressed against his breastplate, hugging me with the other arm to keep me from flying apart when I shuddered. Wynne's gentle fingers tugged my elbow and I let her extract my arm from the tight ball of my body. I felt her take my hand in hers and bit down on the insides of my cheek, focusing on the pain there instead.

There was a loud pop that I heard even through Alistair's hand, and a flash of blazing heat, followed immediately by the tingling coolness of healing magic. A second later she let me go and said something.

"What?" I mumbled, and Alistair uncovered my ear.

"I said, I'm done."

I sat up, pushing his arms away, inexplicably indignant. "What? You're kidding! That's it?"

She smiled. "Well, there will be some physical therapy to help you regain the most use of those fingers, but we're done for now."

I scowled at her, absently swiping at my streaming nose with my sleeve. "I got all upset over _that_?"

"Nobody made you get upset, dear," she said reasonably. "I did tell you it wouldn't be too bad."

"Oh for Stone's sake." I disentangled myself from Alistair and brushed some of the dirt off my pants. Terror had dissolved into anger, made more annoying because there was nobody to be angry at and nothing to be done about it. "Come on. I'm all done making a fool of myself, so we might as well catch up to the carriage and ride in style."

"You didn't make a fool of yourself," Alistair protested. "It was totally understandable. I think you were very brave."

"He's a nice boy, isn't he," Wynne said to me.

"So I've noticed." I forced myself to smile up at him and put my hand in his – my uninjured hand. The other one was going to stay in my pocket for a while until I was sure I could look at it without remembering bones cracking and grinding under my skin. _Ugh, there I go again_, I thought with another full-body shudder.

The aftershocks of that much raw terror lingered, though, leaving me feeling drained and listless for the rest of the day, except for a few minutes of pure delight when Alistair picked me up and set me astride the shoulders of "my" ox, the one I'd picked out as my favorite because it was especially big and also had a cute soft nose. Motion sickness set in quickly from the animal's swaying gait and I had to jump off him, but for a little while I was the tallest person there.

The journey to Redcliffe took a lot out of everyone. Even riding in the wagon or the carriage was wearing, being stuck in close quarters with strangers I didn't know how to act towards. I was used to traveling alone, if I was underground, or with just Alistair and our friends when I was on the surface. This huge group and its complicated camp, with food rations and awkward sanitation arrangements and large group tents, was... well, it was really too much like Dust Town, a place I'd spent most of my life trying to stay away from. I was glad when we came within sight of the castle, and gladder yet when Eamon promised we could have our own rooms, albeit up a tower and neither so large nor so comfortable as our usual guest suite.

My hopes of a more relaxed, less socially fraught pace were dashed when we began to descend the famous iron-streaked bluffs into the town, though. Redcliffe was simply packed. Wall to wall people, streets crammed with temporary homes, community outdoor cooking facilities, and even a big fire in the middle. Oh, and a pall of smog and blowing grit, too.

"_Just_ like Dust Town," I muttered to myself.

"What's that?" Alistair asked.

"Nothing."

Inside the castle, though, it wasn't so bad. Teagan came out to greet us with hugs and smiles and courtly bows for everyone, and I was almost sure I caught him winking at the Queen. A faint blush colored her cheeks, or maybe it was my imagination, and then we were all ushered inside for dinner.

Which I excused myself from almost immediately, pleading a headache from the sun, which was actually true. The rain had finally broken that morning. Poor Alistair tried to follow me, but Teagan insisted he stay and tell him everything that had happened and that I would be better off with peace and quiet anyway. So instead I wandered to the kitchens, alone except for Rocky padding hopefully along behind me, and to my surprise and pleasure I ran into a group of the ex-werewolf women on their way to bring their own dinners down to their men.

They almost dropped their trays in their excitement, twittering like a flock of sparrows and full of eagerness to show me what they had been doing. Their alpha female, Sundancer, of course had to show me her baby boys who, she informed me with with enormous pride, could _all _roll over, which was very impressive for their age. I wouldn't profess to know anything about babies, so I took her word for it and made appropriate sounds of admiration.

After that we finished their interrupted task, bringing dinner to the others, and ate together in the werewolf barracks. It wasn't the quiet solitude I'd wanted, but they were all so openly pleased to see their Warden and to tell me about their adventures in joining the Redcliffe pack that I ended up having a good time anyway.

As dinner was wrapping up, and the younger ones started running around and climbing the furniture in various games, Swiftrunner caught my eye and gestured with a movement of his head for me to follow him upstairs. I did, and we went to the room he shared with Sundancer and their babies.

"We just got back from a patrol down to the lower edge of the territory," he told me in his gruff voice as he and his mate sprawled in a pile on the rug with their babies.

I hovered for a moment, unsure of the etiquette involved, before I settled on the edge of the rug. "I take it you found something you think we should know about. Should I go get Alistair?"

"I've already sent my Gatekeeper to bring him," he said, and sure enough, both men came in through the door after another minute. Gatekeeper threw himself down on the hearth and Sundancer put on of her babies in his lap for safekeeping while Alistair sat cross-legged beside me.

"Alpha Teagan knows this already and will doubtless inform the other alphas," Gatekeeper rumbled, "but since you're here, we thought it would be a good idea to tell you ourselves."

"There's a lot of darkspawn coming," Swiftrunner said bluntly.

Gatekeeper nodded. "And soon. We could see their smoke most of the way up here. You must have seen the refugees we brought with us?"

"We did," Alistair said. He sounded tired. "It's good that you brought them here before the darkspawn got them."

"I think we will have to get them all inside the castle somehow," Sundancer put in. She had been untying her blouse and now she began to nurse the smallest baby with blissful lack of concern for Alistair's intense embarrassment. "I've been thinking about it, and I think it's possible. When Nightsong comes back from her turn working in the infirmary, she can show you the chart we made – she's the one who knows how to read. I only just started."

Sundancer dropped this information like a fisherman dropping a line, and I gave her the reaction she wanted. "You're learning to read? And your friend can do it already? Great work!" She glowed with childlike pleasure.

"Whatever we do, we must do it quickly," Swiftrunner said. His rough face had softened with affection as he looked at his mate, but the softness was fleeting and now he was back to business. "I'm not sure how useful we'll be at this point. We've never fought like this before, trapped in one place."

"I think you've done your job already," I said. "You told us they're coming. We wouldn't have had even that much notice if you hadn't gone scouting."

"Not to mention all the people you saved by clearing out the farmers and villagers on the way here," Alistair added.

At that moment, a tremendous boom sounded from somewhere below the castle, the sound so deep that I felt it in my chest more than I heard it. Swiftrunner was on his feet in an instant, a dagger appearing as if by magic in his hand. "What was that?" he demanded.

"Dynamite," I said, and ran out into the hall and down the stairs with Alistair and the werewolf alpha in pursuit.

I knew exactly what had happened, somehow not at all surprised, and I pulled up the trapdoor in the pantry and descended the stairs into the wine cellar through which Alistair, Morrigan and I had entered in a desperate bid to free the castle from its undead infestation. I pulled my tunic up over my nose and pushed open the unused door that led into the dungeons, and from there to the ancient dwarven tunnel that passed under the lake. A billowing cloud of smoke and rock dust blew into my face when I opened that door, the cloth of my tunic keeping it from going up my nose though I had to squint my eyes almost shut.

"Stone met, warriors of Orzammar," I shouted into the darkness. "You sure know how to make an entrance."

"Some blockhead bricked up the link between this tunnel and the Deep Roads," a voice came through the murk, and I recognized it as belonging to King Bhelen's second, Vartag Gavorn. "Sorry we didn't end up making much use of the waypoints you set up, but after the messenger came back with the news that your friend's castle was connected to the Roads, we thought this way would be faster."

"You got here just in time," I said, waving my hand in front of my face to clear the dust. Inside, I could see the faint blue glow of the lyrium lamps they carried. Behind the light I could hear the movement of many feet as people climbed over the rubble.

"They blew a _hole_ in the _floor_?" Alistair spluttered, horrified. "How am I going to explain that to Eamon? What can I possibly tell him?"

"You can tell him he needs to find room for three centuries of dwarven warriors," Vartag boomed. "And you can tell him they're thirsty, too. The beer ran out days ago."

And then another voice came out of the darkness, achingly familiar. "That you, nugget?"

"Kardol?" I cried. "What are you doing here? You're supposed to be protecting the city!" The forms of the first men became visible now as they drew closer, and I rushed to the one I knew so well and threw my arms around his black-armored shoulders.

"Ah, well." Kardol lifted me off my feet in a rib-creaking hug. "Shirah got better, and had a powerful thirst to kill some darkspawn. It almost broke her heart when I told her she wasn't allowed out of the city anymore, that the King – and me – forbids women going into the Deep Roads any further than the near mining tunnels. So I gave her the golems to cheer her up, and came after you. It gets boring fighting the same darkspawn all the time, and it seems like you Wardens have some more interesting beasties to kill."

"There's one in particular," I told him, panting a little as I got my breath back. "It's a big one. I could use your blade."

"You got it, nugget," he told me. "Till the Stone calls me home, you got it."

* * *

_Thank you all so much, especially my wonderful beta, mille libri. There may be a delay over the holidays, but not because I'm drunk on eggnog. I want to get pretty much the whole ending roughed in before I post the next chapter just in case I end up having to change things. Also, I got my hand stuck in my dog's collar right before he lunged and my first two fingers are swollen up like sausages. Nothing dangerous, but it does slow down the writing :( _

_In case I don't see you again for a while, here's me wishing you a merry Christmas – if you don't celebrate the holiday, then have a happy December 25th... you deserve it!_


	73. The Ogres of War

_I'm not dead, I promise! Remember that finger I thought I'd sprained last December? Yeah, so, I went to the doctor to ask why it wasn't healing, and it turned out that it was actually broken. Oops. Typing endurance has been drastically reduced by the splint. Thank you so so so much for coming back to read anyway! I WILL finish this story even if it kills me. (Hopefully it won't come to that.)_

_As ever, many thanks to the supportive and insightful mille libri, Queen of the Betas!_

* * *

Somehow we found room for all three hundred dwarves that poured up through the new hole in the castle's basement. The process of allocating quarters was made more difficult by the fact that they weren't all one unit. The Prime century was from Bhelen's royal legion, while the second century consisted of men from House Dace and its allies, and the third from a motley collection of warrior caste independent Houses. They all bickered constantly when off the battlefield. Vartag assured me that it was healthy competition and they would strive to outdo each other and thereby fight even harder. I took his word for it; my own experience had been that rival Houses only strove to outdo each other at backstabbing and plotting.

According to Swiftrunner's report, we had only tonight to prepare before the darkspawn army would reach Redcliffe. The castle staff rushed around like bats startled by a sudden light, scrambling to make room to take in the civilians from Redcliffe Village and to bring in food stores. The soldiers had work to do, too, final preparations of the wooden platforms for archers and finishing the last war engines, and they slept in shifts to give the fighting men at least a few hours rest before the battle began.

The ex-werewolves, meanwhile, went straight to bed. They were exhausted from their campaign, many of them limping from being forced to march without rest despite blisters and rubbed-raw skin, and elfroot could not be spared for them. Lightly armored mobile troops weren't especially helpful when defending a castle, anyway. With the guidance of the ancestors, we wouldn't need to call on them at all. If we did, it would be because the walls had been breached. At that point, we would be pretty much screwed.

Redcliffe had been built to defend against any army and had never been taken. High on its rocky islet and accessible only via the old stone bridge, the entire fortress faced forward, as implacable as a living mountain and as hostile as a glacier. Invading infantry was forced to choke together on the bridge and the cramped, exposed space was a literal death trap. But one thing the castle's builders had never planned for was a house-sized, fire-breathing, flying lizard with an Old God's brain.

"We have to bring it down," I said. "Ground it. We'll never be able to kill it in the air. If nothing else, it will just fly away when it starts feeling peaky."

Alistair and I were sitting in Eamon's study with him, his brother, Kardol, and Vartag, making our plans. We all knew that plans never survive the heat of battle, but we made them anyway.

Vartag rubbed his bristling chin. "I'll talk to my chief engineer about the ballistae. It's possible that their mounting could be made to aim upward. Into the... sky." His lip curled slightly in distaste at the word, no doubt thinking that if only we had a good stone mountain over our heads, we wouldn't be having this problem. I gave him a commiserating glance.

"The beast won't hold still while we hack it to death," Kardol said, leaning back in his chair. "Darkspawn never just lay down and die. They try with their dying breath to bring you down with them."

"I'm sure we'll think of something at that point," Alistair said.

I frowned at him in disbelief. Why was he so unconcerned about the archdemon? It was a dragon! He should be terrified!

Before I could demand an explanation, a prickling warmth over my skin preceded a brisk knock on the door. Riordan opened it without waiting for a response, invited himself into the meeting and casually poured a shot of whiskey from the bottle on Eamon's sideboard. "I've come to tell you I'll be out for a while," he said, sniffing delicately at the amber liquid. "Great nose on this whiskey, my lord."

"Thank you," Eamon said, frowning. "Why are you leaving?"

His expression grew slightly pained. "I'm not sure. Something about this doesn't feel right."

"But we need you to be here if the archdemon comes," I protested.

"That's just it." He took a swallow of the liquor and pursed his lips appreciatively before continuing. "I'm not sure the archdemon has any intention of coming here. Alistair, Latitia, have either of you had any nightmares lately that would indicate the archdemon is anywhere close?"

"I don't get the nightmares anymore," I said.

Riordan's eyebrows shot up. "Really?"

I shrugged. "Dwarves don't dream. Not like you, anyway. At first, the archdemon would send me dreams personally, trying to convince me to run away, but after a while he seemed to decide I wasn't worth the effort. I'd be insulted, but the dreams weren't so much fun that I'd like him to start sending them again."

Alistair was frowning in thought, my own dream status not being anything new to him. "Now that you mention it, Riordan, I think you might be right. I haven't dreamed anything different. Aren't the dreams supposed to get extra-intense when the archdemon is about to attack in force? Something about the large number of orders he has to give out?"

"Exactly." Riordan tossed back the last of his whiskey. "But even more telling than that is the fact that you, Senior Ferelden Warden, are stretched out in that chair like tomorrow's fight was no different from any other. If the archdemon were coming, you'd feel it. You'd be frightened."

Alistair bit his lip. He straightened in his chair and brushed a hand over his sun-bronzed hair, as though just realizing that his behavior was different from the rest of us. "So... what do we do?"

Riordan gave him a quick smile. "I'm going to head out and do some listening. See if I can hear any of the archdemon's commands if I get close enough."

"You can do that?" Teagan asked in wonder.

Riordan nodded. "One of the more useful aspects of being a Gray Warden. From what I understand, Duncan tried to explain this to your late King, but your Teyrn Loghain discounted the information. Anyway," he set the empty glass carelessly back onto the sideboard, "I'm off. If I'm wrong and it's really about to attack, I should be able to confirm it and ride back here in time to join the party. If I don't come back before the darkspawn get here, assume that the archdemon isn't anywhere nearby, and I'm still trying to find it."

"Or you're dead," I pointed out.

"Dead? Me?" He grinned, the expression making his weather-beaten face look young. "I'm indestructible. Enjoy your siege, friends. I'm off."

He stalked out of the office, letting the door swing shut behind him. Teagan rubbed his chin and mused, "That is a fearless man."

"Or a foolish one," Eamon said. "We cannot afford to waste Gray Wardens. I'm surprised you let him go, Latitia."

"Me?" I blinked at him. "I can't tell him what to do. He's my superior."

"That's never stopped you before," Kardol remarked.

Planning went on until late at night; Eamon had dinner brought to us rather than interrupt the meeting, and invited more people to share suggestions, including Wynne. The horde's fires weren't in sight of the castle's lookout tower yet, so Eamon made the call to keep the village civilians out until the morning, to give his castle servants more time to prepare quarters for them all. The upside of his decision, as pertained to me and my friends, was that we wouldn't each have to share our bedroom with a half-dozen strangers tonight.

And the upside of _that_ was...

"Finally, some good stone walls between us and hundreds of eavesdroppers," I said as I slammed the door shut behind us, narrowly avoiding Rocky's stub tail as he made a beeline for the rug in front of the fire. "Got any unbearably juicy gossip to share?"

Alistair flopped onto his stomach on the bed and rested his chin in his hands, affecting a high-pitched girly voice. "That Riordan is _such_ a hunk! Ohmymaker, did you see his butt in that tight leather armor?"

"He does have that rakish bad-boy thing going on." I hopped up to sit beside him and began unlacing my boots. "Should I be worried that you're so good at being a vapid teenage girl?"

Alistair sat up and started doing the same, his ears turning slightly pink. "Well, there were a lot of sisters in the Chantry where I grew up. They aren't _born_ matronly, you know."

"Definitely not." I was thinking of Leliana, who was almost as far from matronly as a girl could get.

There was a lull in conversation while we finished struggling out of our traveling clothes, and also folded up the fancy quilted coverlet that was much too pretty to actually use. Fastening the latch on the wardrobe sent a twinge through my left hand and I hissed and shook my fingers, until the cramp went away as swiftly as it had come.

Alistair came up from behind and put his arms around me, leaning on me a little. "Have you been doing the exercises Wynne gave you?"

"Huh?"

"For your fingers and thumb." He slid his left hand down my arm to capture mine, raising it to his lips to kiss the backs of my healing fingers.

Wynne and her exercises seemed incredibly unimportant all of a sudden, but I answered his question anyway, even as I leaned back against his chest and relished his warm, solid presence. "Yeah. When I remember."

"I'll try to remind you. I have to take better care of you because-" He bent and hugged me tight, lifting me off the ground a few inches in a burst of enthusiasm, "I'm _keeping_ you."

My heart filled until I thought I could feel it pressing against my ribs. Serious "relationship talk" didn't come easily to either of us, and this was as close as we'd come to grappling with the enormous, wide-open possibilities opened up by Anora's formal ascension to the throne. The situation called for a heartfelt, emotionally profound, well-worded statement that I was entirely unable to provide. So instead, I said, "No, you got it backwards. _I'm_ keeping _you_."

"I'm okay with that." I could feel the smile curve his cheeks as he pressed a kiss on my hair.

"Oh, good. Now put me over there." I pointed imperiously at the bed, though my air of command was broken by my ear-to-ear grin.

"Yes, my lady." He picked me up the same way, his arms around my waist, then took two strides and flung himself down on the bed with me laughing on top of him. I twisted around to tangle my fingers in his hair and kiss him, thoroughly.

I had never had a future before, or at least not one that I actually wanted. There had never been anything more for me to look forward to than making another month's rent and food bill, no higher aspiration than scraping together enough money to take care of my family so Rica could stop walking the streets. Now my sister and mother were provided for beyond our wildest dreams; the only person I had to worry about was me – Latitia – who was no longer a worthless scavenger but had become a Gray Warden with all the privileges and responsibilities that came with the name... and the unexpected, unprecedented good fortune in the form of a gold ring hanging on a chain around my neck.

* * *

The darkspawn arrived the following morning.

The smoke of burning fields and orchards stained the sky red as the sun rose above the horizon, the first warning of their coming. The second warning was Morrigan, swooping in an hour later to alight on the lookout tower with several severed feathers on her tail, the feathers' corroded edges stained green by an emissary's magical attack. She shimmered into her human form and delivered a terse report of what she'd found to me and the other leaders of the defense who were gathered there to get the earliest possible look at the enemy.

"I saw large numbers of standard foot troops, as expected. I estimate that they will be here in an hour or so," she told us. "Raiders in loose packs, following their alphas and moving with very little discipline and a great deal of wandering about and amusing themselves with idle destruction. I saw eight ogres in the center, supported by at least twelve emissaries that I was able to count before they began using me for target practice."

"Twelve?" Alistair burst out. His hand went unconsciously to rest on his sword hilt, seeking the reassurance of its steel. Beside him, Eamon and Teagan wore identical expressions of tightly controlled, entirely rational fear, while Queen Anora stood a little bit stiffer. Kardol growled, sounding so like Rocky that at first I looked at the dog.

Vartag said, "We're crammed in tight here behind these walls. We'll be in trouble when they start dropping poison gas and fire on us."

Kardol shook his head. "Not necessarily. The range of an emissary's magical abilities depends on its strength."

Vartag mused, "We've never had much call for long range weapons underground, but some of your crossbows look to have enough range to hit them. That reminds me..." He turned to the chief engineer, Olfgar, who had been fidgeting with obvious impatience. "How's the engineering corps coming with the ballistae?"

"Poorly," Olfgar snapped. "Everything is made of wood up here. The only way wooden ballistae would be able to kill an ogre is if they tickled it to death. We tried to strengthen them, make them shoot harder, faster, but they kept exploding under the strain. We finally convinced the Redcliffers to let our blacksmith teach theirs to build a proper steel-framed one. They've got a couple of catapults that aren't complete rubbish but it'll be hours before the ballistae are ready. _With_ _respect_, Captain Vartag, I would be doing a lot more good down there than up here."

Vartag nodded, not at all offended. "Fine, then. Go. We'll send a runner if we learn anything you need to know."

"You probably don't want to hear it," Kardol growled, "but this calls for an early lunch."

"Now?" Queen Anora and I both protested, but Alistair was nodding in agreement.

Kardol looked pointedly at Anora and said, "Your men are about to die for you. Do you want to ask them to die hungry?"

"But-"

"Besides," Alistair said, "men fight better with food. I fight better with food. Lunch sounds good to me."

Ser Perth, who had until then remained silent and stoic, spoke up at that point. "My lords, I believe it would be best for me to ready the walls at this time. I'll give the order for the men on the wall to receive their rations immediately." Eamon gave him a nod, and the armored knight turned and clattered down the tower stairs.

"I'll go make sure the support staff and relief force will be ready to back up the men on the wall," Teagan said, and followed the knight down the stairs.

"What do you wish me to do?" Morrigan asked me.

The submissive question surprised me, and I looked up to see her pale face was even whiter than usual. I thought that the emissaries must have frightened her, and in turn that frightened me. Morrigan knew the extent to which magic could be stretched far better than I, and if she thought the emissaries were a force to be feared, then I believed her. "I think you should save your energy. Sieges are long fights, and battle magic is exhausting." Morrigan nodded her agreement to this, so I continued, "Why don't you help Wynne and the medics instead?"

Her eyes flashed with stubborn anger. "I do not need to be protected and coddled like a frightened child while others are fighting."

"Morrigan," I said, "we have two mages. They have twelve. I would take it as a personal favor it if you didn't get yourself shot or stabbed unnecessarily. I can't call on you for help when the emissaries start kicking our arse if you've been perforated. You're too valuable to risk."

She pursed her lips, her pride somewhat mollified by the recognition. "...As you say. Send for me when the time comes." With that, she left, via the stairs instead of the window to preserve even that small expenditure of magical energy for the coming battle.

"Okay," Alistair said once she'd gone. "I want to stay up here and get a good look at them when they arrive. Then we'll go down to the wall. All right, Tisha?"

"Absolutely not," Queen Anora said at once, before I could reply. "The men on the wall will suffer heavy casualties. Like you just said to your mage, there are only two of you Gray Wardens. I will not allow you to throw your lives away senselessly. You must stay up here with me where it is safer."

"With all due respect, your majesty," Alistair said through a tight jaw, "as Gray Wardens, we are not subject to your battle commands and there is no way in Thedas I'm going to stay in a tower and watch while my friends and allies die. I tried that once, at Ostagar, and I'm not eager to do it again."

"This is what Gray Wardens are for," I agreed. "We won't sicken and die from their blood. We can't be surprised by their movements. We might even be able to predict their actions if we can overhear the archdemon's commands. We're stronger and faster than a normal soldier and we heal more easily." _And after thirty years, the lender comes to collect, and we go crazy and die_, I thought, but didn't think that needed to be said at the moment. "Besides," I added, "if we die, you can just wait for the Orlesian Wardens to come in and take over. How long do you think it will take for them to show up for the party?"

Anora pressed her lips together, uncomfortable about the issue. Loghain's insistence that the Orlesian wardens were a threat evidently still worried her, or maybe she was worried about her maid Erlina, sent to carry the message instead of the no-longer-trustworthy royal messenger service. The issue had been one of many arguments we'd had in the carriage on the way to Redcliffe, and we won only when Erlina herself insisted on going.

"Erlina should be reach them soon," Anora said. "Provided they are willing to come alone, and leave their chevalier escort behind, they should reach the field perhaps within a month."

"A month," I groaned. A month seemed like it might as well be a decade at this point. And again with the Orlesian-Fereldan wrangling! Didn't we have enough problems to contend with already?

"Riordan isn't back," Alistair said suddenly. "He said that if he didn't come back before the darkspawn arrived, then the archdemon wasn't here."

"Well, then where is it?" I considered that the other possibility was that Riordan had been caught and killed, but didn't voice it. "And what does that mean to us?"

"If there's no archdemon, at least we don't have to worry about it flying overhead and breathing fire at us," Alistair pointed out. "But it also means that the archdemon is somewhere else. Somewhere we aren't, which is a problem."

"Here they come," Vartag said.

I rushed over to stand next to my fellow dwarf in front of the south-facing window. The first black specks were cresting the furthest line of russet-colored hills, far enough away that my subterranean eyes couldn't focus on them properly. I felt Alistair's steady presence behind me as we all watched the progress of our enemy. In the blurry distance, the darkspawn army looked exactly like the blight it was. Black spots infected and spread over each hill, darkening the land like some kind of terrestrial gangrene.

They moved irregularly in clumps and larger groups but all converging on the same point: Redcliffe Village. We had a fantastic view as the darkspawn skirmishers descended with howling savagery onto the fishing village, smashing down doors and breaking through windows to gain entry, only to find the buildings abandoned. The raiders vented their frustration by setting fire to anything that burned and defiling anything that didn't.

Meanwhile, a panting maidservant finished cimbing the stairs to the tower and gave us a plate of sandwiches. Nobody touched them except me, Alistair and Kardol.

When the Chantry's iron-barred doors and windows blocked the raider's first attempt to smash into it, the darkspawn brought forth an ogre. We watched the rare monster, wondering what it would do, but our questions were answered when the enormous and grotesquely muscular darkspawn lowered his horned head and charged the gate. His horns stuck in the wood, and he wrenched his head back and forth, splintering the wood with a crack that we heard even at this distance. When his horns came free, he backed up and charged again, and the doors shattered.

"Arl Eamon," Anora said. "Look at that. I had thought the tales of their power exaggerated, but it seems they might even threaten your own castle gates."

"Aye," Vartag nodded. "They do that sometimes. That's what the ballistae are for. No amount of arrows will do much more than piss an ogre off."

"There's no need to fear, my Queen," Eamon said, his voice calm even though his pale cheeks betrayed his own worry. "Our gates are triple layered and have never been breached. Redcliffe will not fail you."

"Look there," Kardol rumbled. He pointed to the road that connected the castle's bridge to the village, where the first of a distressingly large number of genlocks and hurlocks were turning away from the denuded village towards the castle, accompanied by another ogre.

"Oh!" I cried. "Oh, we have to get to the gates and warn them about the ogre!"

"They'll know what to do," Eamon assured me. "They were prepared for a battering ram, but hot pitch will burn an ogre just as well. I strongly urge you to watch for at least a little while. The men are fresh and don't need your help yet. If you're going to insist on fighting, you had better wait for the moments when you are most needed rather than squandering your stamina on repelling siege ladders."

I leaned out over the rampart to squint down at the gate, gnawing on my lip with anxiety. I felt so helpless all the way up here. As always when I'm stressed, my thoughts turned goofy – if I spat from up here, how far would the lake wind blow it before it hit the ground? Could I spit on the darkspawn? Ultimately I decided the risk of accidentally spitting on our own men was too great and prudently decided against the stupid display of defiance.

The first wave poured into the bridge, their shrieking howls incredibly loud even up in the tower, and the archers stationed in the courtyard began to rain sheets of arrows blindly over the wall. What had seemed like a stupid waste of arrows when I'd watched them train for this soon proved itself surprisingly effective as the arrows fell almost vertically upon the tightly packed attackers, crammed into the bottleneck and too disorganized to effectively shield themselves from an overhead attack.

Bodies began to shower down from the bridge as the surviving darkspawn hurled their arrow-struck casualties over its sides to get them out of the way. I winced as they fell, thrashing and bleeding, down to pollute the water of the lake; their black blood spread out like an oil slick, floating for a moment before the thick fluid sank beneath the surface of the waves. Later, the first pale shapes rose to the surface, fish killed instantly by a massive dose of tainted blood.

A group of genlocks sidled to the edges of the bridge and pulled out their ugly black shortbows. The thick, short arrows couldn't get the same loft as those launched from Fereldan longbows, and instead zipped over the crenelations at an oblique angle and struck into the rear ranks of the reserve soldiers. The soldiers formed into compact groups and raised their shields over their heads, but the heavy shafts were able to punch through the shields – not all the way through, but far enough to jab into the arm beneath it. Men cried out in surprise and pain, and Eamon picked up a speaking horn from the small table behind us.

He held the horn to his mouth, aimed it down towards the catapults on the castle roof below us, and hollered, "Engines, give me grapeshot, forty yards out."

The engineers below waved in acknowledgment and the ratcheting sound of the catapults being aimed floated up through the air. A moment later, the ropes holding them back were released with a twang, the torsion belts screamed, and the tree-trunk thick arms sprang up, launching bucketfuls of fist-sized rocks into the ranks of the genlock archers to leave bloody craters in their lines.

The advancing ogre let out a furious bellow when one of the stones struck its armored shoulder, and it broke into a lumbering run. The bridge groaned under its pounding feet, and then the ogre's horns struck the castle gates with a deafening crash.

The men on the gatehouse responded instantly to the impact. Sheltered behind the stone merlons like they were, I thought they must not actually have known it was an ogre striking the gate and not a normal battering ram, because they didn't waste a moment on being flabbergasted at the sheer power of the thing. Instead, they set iron rods into the handles on either side of a cauldron that sat over a smoking brazier, then lifted it up to dump its viscous black contents over the edge of the wall.

Steaming pitch poured over the ogre as it struggled to free its horns from the metal grating that protected the main gate, and it let out a shriek and wrenched itself free with a jerk that left the tip of one horn stuck in the grate. The gate guards straightened in surprise at the sound and leaned out to stare at what they had done as, squealing in agony, the ogre flailed at its head and shoulders, trying to slap the burning pitch away. It succeeding only in spreading the sticky stuff around. Panicked, it trampled back through its own army's ranks and then, thrashing wildly, it plunged over the edge of the bridge to quench its burning in the lake below.

"Wow," I said, impressed.

"That worked," Alistair nodded.

Kardol frowned and asked, "We got any more of that stuff?"

Eamon grimaced. "Some. Pitch is expensive, and this time of year, supplies are low after we've had to winter-proof all our roofs and boats. We could use our cooking oil, but..."

"But we need every drop and every crumb to feed our people," Anora finished. Her normally pink cheeks were pale, but she showed no other sign of distress at the sounds and sights of battle. And smells, I thought as the cloud of reeking fumes from the burnt ogre drifted up into our noses.

"Smells like someone left the oven on," Alistair said, then sneezed.

"More coming," Vartag said grimly.

The first wave was falling back, clearing the bodies, throwing dead and dying alike into the water to make room for what was coming next: another ogre, surrounded by hurlocks and followed by a skeletal figure whose spiked staff trailed a wisp of greenish smoke.

A shout went up from the sergeant at the gate, and his soldiers began manhandling a fresh cauldron of pitch up the stairs at a quicker pace. One of the men lost his grip on the handles for a moment and touched the cauldron with his bare hand to steady it, then let out a cry of pain as the metal seared into his fingers. The other soldiers kept their balance, though, and the cauldron made it to the top just as the ogre made his first run at the gates.

The scene repeated itself: the ogre lumbered forward, heavy and slow but picking up speed, and smashed into the grate with a scream of tortured steel. The gate guards thrust the cauldron into its fitting and swung it forward, the black pitch began to pour over the edge onto the momentarily trapped ogre, and –

Blue-white light flared in a dome around the ogre as the emissary flung a protective field of force around it. Pitch splashed over the energy dome and burst into flame at the contact. The ogre, unharmed, freed his horns from the gate and moved away to prepare for another run, entirely unconcerned by the umbrella of flame over its head. A few seconds later, the pitch burned away and the emissary's hideous face stretched into a triumphant sneer.

"Sod," I said. "How long did Olfgar say those ballistae would take?"

The ogre charged.


	74. Breached

_Guys, I have to apologize. Not only is this chapter incredibly late, but it's also incredibly long, and almost the entire thing consists of fighting darkspawn. My indefatigable beta, mille libri, had many suggestions but, in the end, a chest cold and accompanying lack of energy meant that the chapter didn't get trimmed much. If you get tired of the siege, it's my fault, not hers. As always, my deepest gratitude for your time, and especially the generosity of my reviewers._

_Incidentally, Latitia's experience with the hot nail happened to me not once but TWICE while at the shooting range with bits of hot brass. _

* * *

The ogre charged.

The soldiers on the gate put aside the empty cauldron that had held the useless hot pitch, and they picked up heavy crossbows instead. They formed up in pairs, one shielding the other while he aimed and shot. Genlocks sent their own arrows back at them, zipping like clouds of angry hornets and hitting the shields with punishing force. The soldiers' crossbow bolts shattered against the ogre's armored shoulders and breast and glanced off the smooth horn protecting its bowed head. Some dug into the tough hide of its neck and arms, but none caused enough damage to even make the giant flinch.

Its horns struck the gate, and the very stones of the gatehouse shuddered. Desperately, the guard captain gestured to his men and together they shoved the empty, but still enormously heavy, cast iron cauldron over the walls onto the ogre's head. In the distance, the emissary threw out his hands, and the cauldron bounced off of another blue-white dome of protective force with a hollow clang. It landed on the hard stone and the brittle cast iron cracked like a nut.

I could hear the screech of wrenching metal as the ogre twisted and pulled at the iron grill that was the first line of defense. There was a tremendous, ringing crash and a shout of triumph from the darkspawn, and I knew the grill had been wrenched out of its fittings and tossed aside, exposing the gate itself. The gate was thick and reinforced, but it was mostly wood. If we couldn't stop the ogre, the gate wouldn't last for long, and only the interior portcullis would bar the darkspawn's way.

"Come on, Templar," I said and grabbed Alistair's arm. "Time to earn your keep. Rocky, stay here with Anora. Stay!"

Kardol let out a grunt of surprise; he'd never seen Alistair use his specialized training and had no idea what I had in mind, but he followed us anyway on principle, while the disgruntled dog stood at the top of the stairs and whined at our backs. I think I might have touched one out of three steps as we flew down the tower stairs.

As we emerged into the castle's front courtyard, Alistair suddenly drew up short and grabbed my shoulder, thrusting me behind his armored body and raising his shield over our heads. An instant later, a full darkspawn arrows fell like rain, striking sparks on the paving stones around us.

I heard a sergeant bellowing at the soldiers to angle their shields so the heavy arrows would glance off instead of punching through, and I heard the groans and cries of the men who did it wrong and exposed themselves or their fellows to the deadly missiles instead, as well as the sharp crack of an arrowhead breaking against Kardol's heavy Legionnaires' helmet and the _ping_ of arrows ricocheting harmlessly off of Duncan's superior shield.

When the rattle and hiss of falling arrows slowed, we began to move forward, making our cautious way along the tense ranks of Redcliffe soldiery. At the core of the soldiery stood the glittering Knights, and beside them a century of dwarven heavy infantry crouched behind their oversized siege shields, moveable walls big enough for ten men to advance together. They looked more bored than anything else, glancing at us as we passed with the impassive eyes of warriors to whom this kind of battle had become so commonplace that they had lost their fear of it. Two of them were even engaged in a game of knucklebones.

A bone-rattling crash shook the gatehouse, so much louder and scarier down here that it had been from the tower, and to my horror, the ogre's blackened horns jutted through the splintering wood. It jerked its head back and forth, wrenching the cracks wider, then freed itself and retreated, leaving holes in the planks as wide as my hand.

The gatehouse itself was a two-layered affair with a portcullis on the inner side, the actual gates on the outer side, and an open-roofed kill box in between. The gate guards were standing in the fortified house atop the outer gate, but if (when?) the outer gate fell, they could fall back to a secondary position above the portcullis and rain death from above onto the enemy units stuck in that vulnerable in-between space. In the meantime, they fired a steady rhythm of crossbow bolt through the slits in the crenelated wall.

We mounted the stairs to the gatehouse and the captain of the gate guards turned to us with a scowl. "I didn't call you up here, what are you – Oh! Gray Wardens!" The scowl faded into an expression of hope, and I realized it was Ser Perth himself in command of the gate. "Thank the Maker. Is there anything my men and I can do to help?"

"Try to keep Alistair from getting shot," I told him distractedly. "He's going to break the shield on the ogre so we can hit it."

I peered out through a gap between the stone merlon and a guard's shield and saw the ogre and the emissary standing safely out of bowshot, breathing hard, its arms hanging loose at its sides. The emissary was doing something with its staff, presumably working some sort of restorative magic on the ogre. Maybe it was keeping the thing's brains from being scrambled from the impact of its repeated charges.

In the distance, I could see more genlocks and hurlocks milling around in groups, ravaging buildings, eating livestock, or engaging in scuffles and dominance struggles amongst themselves. I frowned at them; if they had gotten all their ogres together, they could have the gate down already. Instead, they hardly seemed able to focus on the siege at all. They were more like a pack of ravening deepstalkers than any kind of sentient army.

In other words, they were acting like normal darkspawn, the kind I was used to finding in the Deep Roads and treating like a dangerous predator, nothing more. The emissary was the only one acting like it had a plan, which made sense – they were feared as much for their unusual capacity for independent thought as for their magic – but it was no Legion Commander. I felt sure Riordan was right: there was no way the archdemon itself was heading this disorganized horde.

"What are we going to do once I break the magic shield?" Alistair asked, his face already beginning to settle into cool, expressionless concentration. "They don't have any more pitch ready, and arrows don't seem to be doing much."

"I'll take care of it," Kardol said.

I stared at him.

"Do me a favor, tie this to something big," he added, pulling a coil of rope from the knapsack that I never saw him without.

"Why do you have rope?" I blurted. Outside, the ogre began its next charge.

Kardol paused in the act of tying knots at intervals on the rope to give me a stern look. "Don't you?"

"Well, yeah," I sputtered, "but not _here_. I didn't think I'd need it."

He shook his head with deep disapproval. "And now you don't have it. Thought I taught you better than that. Don't tell me you forgot how to tie knots, too."

"Right. On it." I quickly tied the end of the rope to the sturdy iron bracket that had held the cauldron of pitch, leaning back on it hard to set the knot. The rope vibrated slightly in my hands as the ogre's footsteps thundered closer. Kardol wrapped the loose end several times around his left hand.

Alistair stood with eyes closed and hands extended down and to his front as he listened with his Templar senses for the magic to spring to life. The stones vibrated with the ogre's steps and then the entire gatehouse bucked beneath our feet as it crashed into the gate. Wood splintered and my ears immediately began to ring in reaction to the noise of its impact. I smelled ozone and heard a hollow thrumming as the magical shield sprang to life to protect the ogre during its moment of weakness. Thinking quickly, Ser Perth waved and shouted to the archers in the courtyard, and the men launched a full volley of suppressive fire, forcing the darkspawn archers to duck under their shields or die, and buying us precious seconds of safety from their arrows.

Alistair let out a shout, and a wave of energy rippled through me as he released the gathered force of his will. I risked a glance over the top of the shield and saw the emissary stagger as though punched in the gut, and the thrumming of the shield ceased. Alistair sagged against the rear wall, breathing hard.

Kardol dropped his shield to the floor and gripped his sword in both hands. Without ceremony, he vaulted over the wall and vanished from sight. Appalled, I darted forward, reaching after him as though to snatch him back from the brink, but I was too late.

He dropped like a stone, straight down onto the back of the ogre's neck with his sword aimed like a lance. All the weight of his fighter's body and thick armor drove the sword's tip directly into the ogre's spine. Just like that, it was over; the mountain of muscle beneath him collapsed.

Kardol yanked at his sword, but it was stuck fast in the bones of the ogre's neck. Letting out a sulfurous oath, he left it where it was and began to haul himself back up the rope. Perth barked a command and he and two of his men heaved on the rope from above, speeding his way, because the genlocks were reaching for their bows and in seconds the air would be full of their arrows.

"Maker be praised," Perth exclaimed, clapping Kardol on the back as he hopped down from the wall into the gatehouse. "It worked! The beast is dead!"

The gate guards cheered their victory and I breathed a sigh of relief, which quickly transformed into anger. I punched Kardol's shoulder, which accomplished nothing except to redden my knuckles. "Don't scare me like that! You could have been killed!"

Kardol blinked, then burst out laughing. "Nugget, you forget. I'm already dead."

"Go team," Alistair mumbled. He took a drag of his water bottle. Clearly, that templar smite wasn't a stunt he would perform again without a chance to catch his breath.

Ser Perth was taking a look over the wall at the damage done to the gate. A darkspawn arrow glanced off his crest with a sound like a muffled bell, but the knight gave no sign he had even noticed. He straightened and made a sweeping gesture at his men. "Fall back," he commanded. "The front gate is lost."

Even as the gate guards trotted in neat order to the secondary position, just above the internal portcullis, the wooden gate let out a creaking sigh and collapse, no longer able to bear the weight of the ogre's limp corpse. Its tainted mass landed on the bridge with a thump that was almost drowned out by the triumphant howls of the darkspawn who began charging over it. The gate guards took up their positions behind the secondary wall and began raining pointy death onto the intruders.

Hurlocks outside the gate let out a roar of glee. I didn't know what they were so excited about until a broken-nailed hand reached up to grip the edge of the outer wall, above the broken gate. A moment later and a hurlock heaved itself up to the wall by main strength, its eyes blazing with a lust for violence, its height and horned helmet proclaiming it an alpha. With a sick feeling of fear, I realized that it must have used the broken gates as a ramp.

One of Perth's guardsmen saw the creature, too, and let out a horrified shout of warning. He raised his crossbow and pulled the trigger, his aim stupidly far off in his panic, and the hurlock's lips drew back even further from its fangs as it laughed in contempt. Then it reached behind its shoulder, pulled a spiked maul from a loop on its back, and received a dozen crossbow bolts in the chest from the rest of the guards. It slammed back into the stone wall and slid to the floor, leaving a smear of stinking blood like a slug's trail.

More hurlocks, the tallest and strongest able to manage the difficult climb, were boiling up over the edge of the stones, but it wasn't going well for them. Armored shieldguards, specialized men whose purpose was to seal breaches in the wall, stonewalled the darkspawn's advance and prevented them from running amok inside the castle, and the gate guards were over their initial shock and picking off darkspawn one by one as their heads appeared over the edge. My palms itched to go for my daggers and help, but I wasn't needed, not right at this moment. Climbing up the rubble was just too difficult and slow, I thought. Soon, they would have to send another ogre.

Alistair glanced over the inner wall into the courtyard and groaned. "_Now_ they show up! Wow – look at the size of that thing. No more jumping over walls for you, Kardol."

We watched in fascination as the soldiers and archers stationed in the courtyard shuffled their formation around with painstaking care for the genlock arrows still drizzling down on them periodically. They were making room for a crossbow-like war machine of gargantuan proportions. The torsion springs that powered the whole thing sat inside a heavy steel frame, almost absurdly thick and reinforced in order to sustain the intense forces involved. The ballista trundled forward across the cobblestones and came to a stop directly behind the gatehouse.

"How are they going to get that thing up here?" I asked Kardol.

"They aren't," he said. "The gaps in the portcullis are big enough to shoot right through."

"Next ogre that charges will eat a yard-long steel toothpick."

"Yeah."

"Think they'll send some more ogres soon? I'm eager to see it in act-" I stopped mid-word at the faint tremor I felt in the stone at my back. "Oh, sod."

"See?" Kardol raised an eyebrow at me. "This is why you don't go tempting the ancestors with stupid statements like that."

The men on the wall began shouting and gesturing, or firing their precious arrows in the hope of a lucky shot to the ogre's eye or mouth. I leaned forward to watch the ballista, but I couldn't see anything below the protective canopy, so I scurried down the stairs to crouch against the wall where I could watch without getting in the way – of the engineers, or of a darkspawn arrow.

Three members of the dwarven engineer corps were standing around their machine looking mildly bored, though their eyes were alert and intent. The tip of the ballista bolt was aimed through one of the holes in the portcullis. The machine's bowstring literally hummed with tension, a faint but distinct high-pitched whine like an eager dog, but soon all I could hear was the charge of the ogre.

Deliberately, the engineer at the rear of the ballista laid a hand on a lever, waited an instant, and chose his moment. A jerk on the lever released the string, the machine bucked like a bronto in heat, and the steel bolt simply disappeared, propelled so quickly I couldn't follow it with my eyes. Seemingly in the same instant came a crunching thud of impact, followed by a breathless, gurgling groan.

I spun to look through the portcullis, and through it I saw an ogre plucking at the bolt, as thick as my wrist, that transfixed its chest, an expression of bewilderment on its brutish face. The creature's hands fell away from the bolt a breath later and its face went slack as its body crumpled to the bridge's stones.

"Get out of the way, you sun-touched fool," snarled a rough male voice behind me, and I turned to see the engineers had already loaded a new bolt and were in the act of turning the winch to draw it. "We're gonna take a shot at that emissary bastard."

I let the rudeness go and moved out of the way. I'd heard worse insults from worse men, and the bolt's head was... large. And right at eye level.

"He thinks he's out of range – ha! This baby shoots twice as far as a bow," the engineer chuckled to himself as he made minute adjustments to the machine's aim. A gnarled hand suddenly thrust through the portcullis, slicing in the direction of the machine's cross-braces with a battered sword. The engineer scowled and pulled on a lever, and the genlock's head exploded in a shower of gore. The bolt continued through several more luckless darkspawn that had been standing behind it.

I backed a judicious distance away from the portcullis and hollered up the stairs to the legionnaire. "Kardol! Looks like they've got things under control here. Let's go see how Wynne's doing."

"Who?"

"The mage. Not the one with the boobs, the other one. Alistair, come with, we'll grab a snack after."

The healers' tents weren't too bad yet. Most of the injuries were arrow wounds, easily treated, and without risk of contamination from tainted darkspawn blood. I had a feeling that would begin to change, though, now that the wall had been compromised and hand-to-hand fighting had begun, even at such a small scale.

Leliana had joined Mother Hannah and the other lay sisters in offering first aid and many other necessary but unglamorous tasks – changing bedding, washing implements, etc. Zevran, meanwhile, had been put to work by Morrigan and was grinding and mixing a dizzying array of herbs at a desk in one corner. Morrigan was working him like a slave driver, and Zev was enjoying it entirely too much for good taste. Kardol offered to lend his expertise in battlefield hygiene to prevent the wounded men from contracting darkspawn taint, and Wynne accepted. Alistair and I made good our escape and went to scrounge something to eat.

Alistair's expression was thoughtful. "Maybe the new ballista could shoot poisoned bolts. Or explosive ones. I don't think an arrow would have much luck penetrating a dragon's hide. They use it to make the best armor money can buy, I think it's safe to assume that dragon skin is at least as tough as ogre skin."

"First we have to find the big bird." I waited while Alistair stepped forward to hold the door open, then helped Leliana into the cool darkness of the castle's interior. "I wonder if Riordan is having any luck finding it?"

"We should report to Arl Eamon," Alistair said. "Then we can watch for him from the tower, in case Riordan comes back."

"Through an army of darkspawn?"

"He's smart. He'll think of something."

Rocky was still at the top of the stairs where we had left him, his chin on his paws and his muzzle drooping over the edge of the top step. He leaped to his feet at once when he saw us and writhed around me with massive delight, wiggling his stubby tail and sniffing and licking my hands. Despite having carefully washed my hands, he scented the darkspawn blood on them and gave me a deeply reproachful look for having entered battle without him.

We filled in the nobility on what had happened, and then it was time to watch and wait, again. Four more ogres and an emissary died before the darkspawn finally managed to get the word out to the entire horde that they were wasting their most valuable troops; yet more evidence of the lack of coherent leadership in their ranks. Instead they were throwing their expendables at the wall, though not in great numbers, just enough to keep the pressure on and prevent the Redcliffers from getting a real rest. Groups of darkspawn surged back and forth over the hills behind them, visible to me only as black globs at that distance, until they washed up against the castle like waves lapping at a boulder.

"I don't understand it," Anora said finally, when the sun began to sink below the iron-red hills. "Whatever I may lack in field experience, I have made up for in study. I've read about every major battle in Ferelden's history. The darkspawn's tactics make no sense. Why send themselves piecemeal against us, only to be destroyed?"

"They're darkspawn," Vartag grunted. "They're monsters. They do this sort of thing to Orzammar all the time, just for the fun of it."

"Not when there's a blight," Alistair disagreed.

A memory rose to the surface in my mind, a battle at nightfall lit only by torches and fireballs. "They're waiting for dark," I said. "You'll be blind, but they won't."

Eamon lifted his chin. "It will make no difference. My soldiers know this fortress, their home ground. They could defend it blindfolded."

"I sure hope he's right," I started to whisper to Alistair, but stopped when I saw his face. He looked almost ready to bolt, to dash down the stairs and hurl himself at the enemy rather than watch his allies die while he stayed safe in a tower, a protected asset to be safeguarded for future use. So, I said instead, "And dwarves see in the dark. We'll step in if things go wonky, right, Vartag?"

"Sodding right we will."

The deepening shadow of the hill swept forward across the ground, then crept along the bridge. For a few minutes, the scene was a perfect symbolic tableau, with the sunlight gleaming brilliant gold on the Redcliffe soldiers on the wall while the putrid army below them moved in darkness. The evening wind kicked up from the lake, and I began to shiver and huddled against Rocky's warm flank. The dog seemed to understand the gravity of the situation, even if he didn't fully grasp the complexities, and he sat on his haunches, looking brave and stoic as a statue, and waited for further instructions.

In the starlight, the darkspawn on the bridge were outlined in white, clear to my eyes. Perhaps even clearer than during the day, since there was no blinding glare from the sun giving me a headache and making me squint. Vartag's eyes were even fresher from the tunnels and he looked deeply relieved, rubbing his forehead and temples where the tight muscles were finally relaxing. Judging from Eamon's frown, though, the humans couldn't see jack in the dark, and so I was the one to first see the emaciated forms congregating at the far end of the bridge, their distinctive crested hats clearly marking them as what they were: emissaries.

"We have a problem," I said, and pointed. The faint glow of their enchanted staffs was just visible to the humans' night-blind eyes, now that I'd shown it to them.

Alistair let out a hiss of breath when he saw them. "I can't counter that many. I break up one spell, they just cast another."

"Look what they're doing on the bridge," Vartag said.

I did, and saw that, under the emissaries' direction, the darkspawn were making some use of the many, many arrow-struck corpses that littered the bridge. Instead of simply chucking them into the lake, they were piling them up into bulwarks. The corpse mounds wouldn't have protected them from regular arrows shot up in an arc, but it didn't matter; they were beyond bowshot of the castle's walls. Instead, they were meant to shelter anything behind them from the incredibly long range of the ballista's bolts.

The group of emissaries made their way to about halfway down the bridge and then set up camp behind one of the meat shields, sitting in a ring like gossiping women.

"That can't be good," Alistair said.

"Seconded," I agreed. "Let's get Morrigan and Wynne."

"Good idea."

"What's going on?" Anora demanded. "What can't be good?"

"They're doing magicky stuff." I waved a hand in a vaguely mystical gesture. "I recommend you lot stay up here. Actually, your majesty, you might want to go into the keep. Near the rear, away from the windows. Rocky, stay with Anora. Keep her safe!"

The dog flicked his ears in acknowledgment. Anora paled, but we left before she could demand more explanation, which I wouldn't have been able to give anyway. I just knew that, whatever the rotten things were brewing up together, it probably wasn't a nice dark ale.

The attack began just as we emerged into the chill night air. The breeze that had been blowing off the lake suddenly stilled; Redcliffe's banners stopped snapping and drooped lifelessly on their poles, the air itself somehow heavy and foreboding. A moment later, Alistair staggered to a stop and let out a strangled sound, pressing his hands to his temples.

"Eurgh," he groaned. "That is just _nasty_."

More than a little worried, I was about to ask what was wrong when Morrigan and Wynne both came stumbling out of the healer's tent, wild-eyed.

"What's happening?" Wynne demanded, her voice shrill, almost panicky. "Wardens? I know this – this _stink_ in the air, I felt it in the Tower!"

Morrigan's eyes blazed. "Powerful blood magic is upsetting the natural order. We must put a stop to it at once."

"Awesome, I'd love to," I said. "How?"

"The emissaries... We have to get to the gate," Alistair said. His face twisted with revulsion and he spat onto the cobbles. "Ugh, I can _taste_ it!"

The castle courtyard was eerily silent. In the absence of anything close to the walls to shoot at, and no enemy archers to shoot back at them, the soldiers and archers had nothing to do except stand around and dread what was coming. The four of us squeezed through their ranks to stand under the dwarven shield walls and look through the portcullis, but we couldn't see anything except mounds and mounds of corpses. Their fetid blood steamed in the night air.

And then, in less time than it took to draw a breath, a greenish fog roiled up from the corpse mounds and rushed at the gatehouse. The guards above the gate let out a shout and beat a hasty retreat along the wall as it rose. Tendrils of fog so thick it looked almost solid reached through the portcullis and poured eagerly into the castle. A heartbeat later and it had engulfed the ballista and its entire crew of three engineers.

Three horrible, rending screams split the night, screams that ended in a rattling cough, then silence.

Men cried out in shock, a lifetime of anti-magic sermons filling them with terror, and the sergeants bellowed at them in a futile effort to manage an orderly retreat. The rank and file scrambled back from the fog, crashing into each other, falling to be trampled by their fellow soldiers. The century of dwarves had seen, or learned about, darkspawn emissaries' death clouds during their regular defense of Orzammar's walls, and weren't as shocked; they moved back in good order, spitting curses in anger at the deaths of three of their irreplaceable engineers. Bodies jostled and pressed back against me and my friends, and for a few moments I couldn't see anything over all the tall folk until I managed to sidle around behind the dwarves.

The fog thinned somewhat as it spread out, and its advance slowed, then stopped. The green-brown cloud just hulked there, filling the gatehouse and blocking anyone from getting within twenty paces of the ballista. Its edges swirled and eddied, seemingly at random, until a young man with more guts than sense tried to get a closer look. One lazy tentacle licked out and slapped him across the face.

He flung himself away from it, clawing at his face and letting out short, gasping sounds, as though in too much pain to manage a proper scream. Wynne leaped forward and caught the young soldier before he could fall, helping him to sit on the ground. She pried his hands from his face. An experienced medic, Wynne was too disciplined to react to the bubbling ruin of his face with anything more than an instant's frozen hesitation before she took a deep breath and began her spellwork. The victim's friends weren't so controlled, though, and shouts of horror rose up until the sergeants could bludgeon them into silence.

That's when we heard the pounding of hundreds of feet on the bridge, and the deep roars of the last two ogres.

I looked up at Alistair expectantly. He sensed my gaze and glanced down, then went rigid. "Me? Dispel that? You can't be serious. Maybe if there were five other templars with me, but alone? Not happening."

We both turned to look at Morrigan.

She hadn't waited for authorization. Her eyes were already closed, her face and hands turned up towards the night sky. Her shining black hair lifted out as though stirred by a breeze, and her skirts began to flap in a wind no one else could feel. The noise of the darkspawn grew closer, and I bit my lip, silently urging her to hurry, and then she gave a shout and swept her hands forward.

A freezing gale blasted out from her, not the ice I'd come to expect but simply cold winter air, a _lot_ of it. The wind struck the death fog and sent it into a furious whirlwind of motion, whipping its edges into a frenzy but steadily driving it away, forcing it to pile up inside the gatehouse proper, where it boiled and writhed like a chained beast. The ballista came back into view, the bodies of the engineers collapsed around it as though convulsed in agony, their faces mercifully hidden from view by their own hands.

Morrigan let out a gasp and I looked up at her quickly. Her whole body was shaking with the effort of moving so much air. "I cannot... hold," she panted.

"Go! Get the ballista!" I shouted to the men around me, knowing I could never move the heavy thing myself. The nearest dwarf jumped forward to grab it, unafraid of the bodies or of the clinging film of corruption that lingered around the machine, and, to my surprise, I realized it was Oghren. I hadn't expected him to be willing to stand to battle here, beside the other warriors who held him in such contempt, but here he was. And sober! I was so proud.

The red-bearded berserker took hold of the huge machine and heaved back on it, Morrigan's wind whipping at his braids and coating his armor in rime, until it began to roll back on its wheels. I ran to meet him when he had pulled the ballista away from the lashing fog and together we wound the winch, forcing the ballista's arms back until they hummed with tension. The swamp witch cried out and her focused gale fell apart into a more normal wind, but it did not stop entirely. Her hands were still outstretched and her will was still upon it. Whatever she was doing now was simply more stubtle.

Then the first ogre struck the portcullis with shattering force. Steel shrieked. I scrambled to fit a bolt into the slot, but I couldn't _see_ the gatehouse through that sodding fog, and when I yanked the lever and the ballista bucked beneath me as it fired, the fog lit up from within as the bolt missed and struck the portcullis, sending up a burst of sparks.

Almost sobbing with frustration, I hopped back off the machine and began to wind the winch again. Alistair's hands appeared beside mine and the work went faster. At my gesture, Oghren slammed his shoulder against the ballista's body, nudging it several inches to the side. The sound of his armor hitting its reinforced frame was buried under the deafening noise of the second ogre headbutting the gate. I fitted another bolt, my hands shaking with urgency, and pulled the trigger almost before the bolt had settled into the slot.

The torsion springs thrummed once more, and the bolt flew straight and true. There was a meaty _thunk_, and the ogre's roar rose an octave in pitch, becoming a scream of agony.

"Got the bastard!" Oghren shouted and made an obscure, anatomically unlikely, and extremely offensive gesture in the direction of the darkspawn horde.

Ser Perth had finally made it down to the courtyard from his position on the wall, after having had to go the long way round to find a stair not blocked by the deadly fog. He lifted his voice to a parade ground bellow. "Archers! Form ranks directly in front of the gate. Look lively, now – stay back from the fog! That's right!" He lowered his voice and nodded politely to me and my friends. "Down on your knees, please."

We hastened to obey, huddling against the ballista's sturdy sides, and at Perth's command the archers loosed a full volley directly at the portcullis. There were more flashes of light as many arrows pinged off of the steel bars, but there were many more howls of furious pain as the arrows lacerated the ranks of darkspawn that were even now working to drag the massive corpse out of the way and clear the route for the last remaining ogre.

Perth's archers launched another volley, and another, each time forcing the darkspawn to start over with fresh troops and slowing their efforts. Genlocks on the other side began firing back, and men died, though the dwarves' siege shields protected all but the unlucky.

I had just started to crawl over to check on Wynne and her progress with the burned soldier, keeping my head down, when the men around me moaned and rocked back on their heels in fear of something I couldn't see. Perth barked a command to stand fast; their legs locked in automatic obedience, and a second later they relaxed. Annoyed, I pushed my way out of the block of archers and stood up to look around. The cause of the commotion was a second fog, which had turned out to be the usual kind, not some new sinister working of the darkspawn.

But neither was it entirely natural. The mist rose up from the lake below and thickened until it felt like I was breathing more water than air, and it began to swirl around above our heads with the aid of Morrigan's wind. Morrigan, kneeling in the clear space at the rear of the courtyard where I'd left her, bared her teeth in a snarl of determined effort, and all at once the newborn thunderhead began to rain. Thick sheets of freezing rain rolled across the courtyard and battered at the death fog, plastering it flat, ripping its edges to tatters.

Within minutes, it had been beaten down to no more than four feet or so in height. We could see that the portcullis, though warped, still held firm. Through it, we had an unobstructed view of the bridge. The archers let out a whoop and began to aim their shots properly now that they could see. There would be no more surprises, and the fog would be kept in check.

Morrigan simply collapsed, melting onto the cobbles without a sound.

With a cry of dismay, I ran to her side and lifted her head up into my lap and out of the rapidly deepening puddles. Her eyelids fluttered and she mumbled groggily, "So much blood. We gave them so much blood to use... It's strong. This was... the best I could do."

"Thank you," I said, but her eyes were closed now. I turned and shouted for Wynne, and she came, scattering infantry like startled nugs.

When she saw Morrigan, she sucked in her breath through her teeth and knelt beside the younger mage. "I've read about weather magic, but to see it... The poor thing is exhausted. Here," she reached inside her robe and dipped her hand into a hidden pocket. The hand reemerged holding a tiny glass bottle that glowed faintly blue. "Hold up her head."

I did, and Wynne pried open Morrigan's mouth and tipped the contents of the bottle between her lips. The effect on her was electric, literally. Static zapped my fingers where they touched her head. Morrigan gasped and stiffened, her eyes flying open, glazed and staring. She screamed.

Wynne slapped her sharply across the face. "Wake up!"

Morrigan shuddered and blinked her eyes. Then she raised a hand to her cheek and shot a knife-edged glare at the other mage. "You are very, very lucky I am too weak to obliterate you on the spot. _Never_ lay a hand upon me again."

"Yes, yes." Wynne waved a hand at her dismissively and stood up to bustle off to her healing tent. Genlocks were beginning to send arrows back at the Redcliffe archers, and the wounded needed her. "Warden, have one of these nice boys carry Morrigan to the tents to rest."

"I'll do it," Oghren offered, making a desultory effort not to leer _too_ much.

I glared at him. When had he shown up? And – if he was here, following me around, then who was manning the ballista with Alistair? Worse, Alistair loomed up behind him and gave him a mock punch in the shoulder. "Have some respect, billy goat."

"You and you," I picked out nearby infantrymen at random. "Take Morrigan someplace safe. Go on, don't be such a pussy! Magic isn't contagious! C'mon now," I gestured to Alistair and Oghren to follow me as I began pushing back through the archers to the ballista, "we have to get back in position before-"

"Emissary!" One of the Redcliffe engineers manning the catapults on the keep's roof let out a shrill cry of warning, his voice cracking with fear. His cry was almost lost in the noise of battle, but it was soon echoed by archers in the courtyard, and the panicked men let loose a rattle of badly-aimed shots at the skeletal figure standing just at the edge of their range.

I broke through the press and was about to leap onto the ballista when Alistair's mailed hand closed on the collar of my leather jerkin and practically picked me up off the ground in his haste to pull me back. "Fall back!" he shouted, waving his other arm frantically at the soldiers packed in around us even as he struggled to drag me through them and away from the machine. "Get out of here, fall back _now_!"

Confused, I looked over my shoulder, out through the gate. The emissary's eyes were as black as the deepest tunnels and it was looking_ right at me_. Its face twisted into a dreadful smile, and, ignoring the arrows rattling into the stones at its feet, raised its staff and whipped it forward.

Flame so hot it burned blue shot forth from the staff in a tightly controlled sphere. It blazed in an absolutely straight line, ripping a glowing hot hole in the portcullis, and crashed into the ballista. Cherry-red pieces of shrapnel exploded out and up in a great cloud of smoke, and men began to scream and thrash in panic as bits of heated metal inevitably found holes in their armor or, worse, their visor. A broken nail struck me just above the collar of my jerkin and, because that was the sort of world we lived in, it rolled down under my collar and got stuck in my breastband.

"Son of a _bitch_ ow ow ow sodding ow!" I wrenched myself out of Alistair's grip and doubled over, trying to shake the dastardly piece of metal out of my shirt. It wouldn't budge and I had to fish it out with my hand, keeping up a steady stream of profanity. I was sure I'd get a new scar from this.

When my personal emergency was over, I straightened up and looked around, trying to take in the extent of the damage. Alistair and Oghren both seemed fine, far enough away and well enough armored to make it okay. For the archers closest to the blast, the sheer radiant heat of the fireball had been enough to sear right through leather armor to burn the man beneath, warp their bows, and snap the fragile bowstrings. Men were staggering or being carried to the healing tents, sobbing and moaning in agony. Without Alistair's trained senses, we would have been among them.

The ballista was totally slagged.

Stricken, I stared at the blackened patch on the cobbles, and then raised my gaze to the emissary. It stood on the bridge, leaning on its staff as though tired, and frowned in a professional sort of way through the dissipating cloud of smoke. When it saw the ballista was indeed dead, it turned on its heel and began to limp back behind the closest corpse wall, making a flicking gesture with one hand towards the packed ranks of genlocks and hurlocks waiting for their signal. Blood trickled from one leg, where a shot from a particularly powerful bow had managed to graze it.

Around then my ears stopped ringing enough for me to notice a sound that had been going on since just before the blast: a ratcheting, clanking sound coming from the keep roof where the catapults were. "Ready?" came the voice of Redcliffe's head engineer, followed shortly by "Pull!"

The team of catapults all loosed at once with a tremendous banging as the machines bucked and kicked under the force. Buckets and buckets of fist-sized stones arched overhead and it became clear that, although the emissary was indeed out of reliable bowshot, it certainly wasn't beyond the reach of the war machines.

Darkspawn paused in the act of rushing towards the gate, looked up, and then bolted forward with renewed urgency when they saw that the deadly rain was aimed at their rear. At the last second, the emissary looked over its shoulder. Its eyes widened and it threw up a clawed hand, clearly trying to will some magical shield into place. Maybe it was still drained from its fireball, or maybe the sheer volume of stone falling out of the weeping sky was just too much to stop; whatever the reason, the stones flattened the tainted mage into greasy pulp.

A cheer went up from the engineers, but there was no answering cry from below. Ser Perth, protected by his armor and his honor from such trivial things as exploding ballistae, bellowed orders to his sergeants and fought to whip any men still fit for battle into some kind of formation. But his block of archers had been badly damaged and demoralized, and instead of re-forming their squared ranks, they cringed back from the gate and the darkspawn like a frightened pack of deepstalkers recoiling from the light of a torch.

Worse, the deadly fog was still there. Squashed down to a sullen shadow of itself, sure, but it still swirled around almost waist deep for several yards between us and the portcullis, and it blocked access to the gatehouse stairs. Perth was clearly unwilling to order men into it to test whether it was still dangerous despite having been diluted by the rain, and none of the Redcliffers showed signs of wanting to become a test subject volunteer. And as if that weren't enough, the puddles had begin to ripple rhythmically as the last ogre set the ground shaking. He wasn't running, just stomping inexorably at our last line of defense.

Kardol was shouting my name, and I called back to him, letting him know where I was. He shoved aside a sobbing militia bowman and stared at me for a second, pale with worry.

"I'm fine," I said quickly.

The legionnaire relaxed visibly. "Right. Good. I heard the fireball and... Hrrhm." He cleared his throat, embarrassed, and turned towards the gates, shoving his helmet on to hide his face. "Looks like you might need me up here anyway."

The smaller darkspawn reached the gate, and I heard the cracking and rending of the last timbers. A half-arsed volley of arrows flickered out from the drastically reduced ranks of archers, dragging shrieks and howls of pain from the enemy infantry but nowhere near the withering devastation of their earlier efforts. I realized with a start that the rain had doused most of the torches, and the humans must be nearly blind. No wonder they were panicked.

And then the ogre appeared, looking a _lot_ bigger from down here on the ground, its huge head bowed to fit into the gatehouse. Arrows struck it, quivering, obviously causing insignificant wounds. It ignored them and raised its hands – some part of my mind gibbered at me that each hand was big enough to entirely encircle my waist, each wrist twice as thick as my thigh – to grasp the steel bars of the portcullis and _heave_.

"Ach, this is stupid," Oghren burst out. "I'm done cowering behind walls and arrows like an old woman."

With that, the warrior unslung his waraxe from his back and waded into the fog. He stood still for a moment, up to his chest in the roiling cloud. "Bit like a hot bath," he grunted finally. "Really, really hot bath. Brisk."

"Right then." Kardol's sword was suddenly in his hand and he was running forward, roaring, "For Orzammar!"

The dwarven warriors roared with him and surged into motion. In the same instant, the ogre gave one more tremendous wrenching heave and the portcullis was torn right out of its socket. The ogre let loose a deafening bellow of pure hate and took two steps forward, into the castle courtyard. It raised the warped portcullis overhead, broken chains swinging from its corners, and hurled the entire thing into the dwarven front line.

The portcullis must have weighed nearly half a ton and it crushed three men at once, killing them in their tracks, and such was its speed and momentum that it flipped end-over-end twice before landing flat somewhere in the middle of the Redcliffe infantry, leaving a trail of casualties behind it. Oghren and Kardol were ahead of the formation, though, and they made it under the ogre's guard before it had recovered its balance.

Oghren screamed in rage and swung a massive overhand blow, adding the momentum of his charge to the strike as well, and the heavy blade bit deep into the ogre's upper thigh, as high as Oghren could reach. Kardol moved with silent, efficient ferocity and likewise used his charge to add power to his sword, bracing the hilt with both hands and running it straight into the same leg, spearing the muscle above the knee. The ogre didn't seem to even feel the blows, but instead swiped at them irritably, hitting both men with one sweeping sledgehammer blow of its fist. My friends slid five feet across the wet ground, their weapons ripping free of the ogre's flesh in a spray of dark blood – not enough blood. They'd missed the artery.

Incredibly, Kardol kept his feet, having caught the blow properly on his shield, but Oghren stumbled over the uneven paving and fell on his back in a clatter of armor. The ogre lowered its head and charged right past them into the advancing ranks of warriors, its curved horns driving a wedge into their formation and wreaking terrible havoc as it ran twenty feet right through their lines... right towards Alistair and me, drawn to the taint in our blood.

The Knights of Redcliffe roared and rolled in from all sides. Their greatswords, so unwieldy in normal combat, gave them the power they needed to hack through the tough skin. Blood began to spill from the ogre by the bucketful, but the creature was so big, it would take precious minutes for it to bleed to death, and all the while men would die.

The beast bellowed and lashed out with its fists and swung its massive head back and forth. Anyone it struck was thrown back, and soon the dark ground was dotted with glittering shapes, the bodies of fallen knights. Darkspawn poured through the open gate, and I heard Oghren's wordless battlecry as he and the dwarven infantry held back the tide. Alistair shouted and threw himself into battle beside Ser Perth, deflecting a blow aimed at the knight and following up with a vicious slash at its wrist.

It really was a very _large_ ogre. Years of believing that discretion was definitely the better part of valor told me to let the big boys handle this. Then a young knight's body was hurled past me, his breastplate horribly crushed, and for an instant I saw Alistair's face instead of the stranger's. The ogre's head swept by, ending the arc that had just killed that man, and hesitated for an instant, its beady eyes locked on mine, and I saw how I could end this battle right now.

I ran straight at its face, at its eye, my gaze locked on that one tiny vulnerable spot. My target widened as the ogre realized the strange little darkspawn-but-not-darkspawn was actually attacking it, but by now I was full of so much pumping adrenaline that the world seemed as clear as crystal and as slow as syrup. Like Kardol, I'd learned to fight silently, and so the only sound that accompanied the attack was the scrape of metal on bone as I rammed the dagger up to the hilt into the socket of the ogre's left eye.

The ogre squealed, at first more shocked than pained, and jerked its head back. I gave the dagger a half-twist as it came free, and blood slewed out from the hole by the gallon as the monster swung its head back and forth in agony. The grievous wound, on top of all the others it had taken, was too much. It gave one more tremulous howl and collapsed, gasping and shivering in the freezing rain. A few more heartbeats, and it lay still.

"I say, well done," Ser Perth exclaimed, raising his visor to flash me a smile. Alistair turned to grin at me, opening his mouth to say something, and a genlock arrow plummeted out of the sky and hit me in the chest. The world tipped sideways; the cold, wet stones smacked against my cheek.

Over my own blood surging in my ears, I could hear the din of battle as darkspawn took advantage of the confusion and distraction to run up the gatehouse stairs and attack the wall guards... The screams coming from above must be them, I thought. There were just so many of the enemy. If they had to, they could die and die until their bodies made a ramp and the wall didn't even matter anymore.

Familiar arms slid gently under my shoulders and legs and lifted me up. I wanted very badly to scream, but there wasn't enough air in my lungs, and within moments the pain simply washed the world away.

…

"And use a Maker-forsaken stretcher next time, for Andraste's sake!" Wynne's voice, tired and strained, came from right above my head.

"I'm sorry, but it really wasn't safe to just leave her there while I went and fetched one," Alistair replied quietly.

The mage sighed, and for the first time since I'd met her, she sounded old. "No. I suppose it wasn't. And... if what you say is true, it might not be safe here for much longer, either."

A horribly invasive sensation rippled along my side as Wynne re-inflated my collapsed lung. She wasn't wasting any energy on numbing the pain. Seconds that felt like years passed and then I could breathe again. I sucked in a deep, grateful breath and immediately began to cough wetly.

"That's right, dear, cough it all up," Wynne said encouragingly, patting my back. "Alistair, bring her that bowl to spit the blood into. I'll be back to check on her in a minute."

She bustled away, her attention demanded by the groaning men awaiting triage. I was lying on a small cot, one that had seen hard use recently and was still damp from being hastily rinsed off, in a relatively uncrowded corner of the big tent. The rest of the tent was crammed tight with the wounded, arranged in neat rows in apparent order of the severity of their injuries. Mother Hannah and her sisters were in constant motion among them. The air felt thick and cloying with the smells of medicinal herbs and bodily fluids.

Far in the back, partially screened off from the rest, lay the men already showing signs of blight sickness. Nobody went near that place.

Alistair sat on the ground beside the cot and helped me sit up so I wouldn't choke. I leaned over the bowl and hacked up chunks of clotted blood, my muscles shivery and weak. My bones felt as fragile as eggshell and it hurt to cough; I tried to stop and rest, closing my mouth, but all I accomplished was to cough blood out my nose. It was so pathetic and gross and humiliating that I started to cry, which was just great because then I had snot and tears on my face, too.

I could still here the screams and crashes of the battle. I couldn't believe Redcliffe Castle was breached. How could that have happened? How could we let ourselves be surprised and overpowered like this? And then, I knew exactly how. The knowledge slipped like ice into my belly.

"This is all m-my fault," I sobbed, utterly miserable.

Alistair fished a mostly clean cloth from inside his breastplate and handed it to me so I could wipe my face. "What are you talking about? You were awesome! It was just bad luck that arrow hit you."

"No... not that. Everything." I had to stop to cough and blow my wretched nose again. "Th-the whole s-stupid siege. If I had just left well enough alone, the whole F-Ferelden army would be here! Everyone is going to _die_ because I was _arrogant_ enough to think I knew better! I should have obeyed Eamon! I should have let him do his job, and focused on the darkspawn! I never should have killed Lo –"

"Ssh!" Alistair clapped a hand over my mouth before I could say the name, glancing around the tent at the frightened soldiers all around us. "You can't say things like that here," he whispered, removing his hand.

"It's true, though," I said, in a more subdued tone. "We lost the Landsmeet because of me. Ferelden is divided and the Queen had to run away like a thief, with none of her army to keep her safe except some guards. The gates are breached, Alistair! We're done for!"

"No!" he hissed, and I looked up in surprise to see his eyes blazing with sudden anger. "Don't you _dare_ give up. Not now. Not on me."

I blinked up at him, tears welling up and spilling down my cheeks, and then I looked away, ashamed. I felt very small, very insignificant, and very far out of my depth. It was a depressingly familiar feeling. Everyone was always bigger and stronger than me, or prettier, or better educated, or just richer and more powerful.

Well. I'd never let that stop me before.

I scrubbed hard at my face with the back of my sleeve since the handkerchief was now so sodden that it was worse than useless, spat out one more glob of crud, and cleared my throat. "Okay."

Wynne was on her way back to us now, having finished bossing the nurses around. She stumbled over an uneven paving stone and her frayed temper snapped; she snarled, and with a little puff of dust, the stone flattened itself into the earth with an almost apologetic creaking sound. The mage huffed to herself in satisfaction, smoothed her apron, and hurried over to me. "How are we feeling?"

"Shitty," I said, but my expression was speculative as I looked at her.

She raised a white eyebrow. "Yet well enough to be snide. You can't be that ill." She laid her hands on me, one on my side and one over my belly, and frowned in concentration. "All right," she sighed. "You're in no immediate danger. Here - I set aside some elfroot in reserve specifically for you and Alistair." She pulled a pouch from an inner pocket and gave it to me. "Drop a pinch into a cup of hot water and drink the whole thing, leaves and all, then go to bed."

Kidney? I shuddered. "Got it. Wynne – don't leave yet. I need to talk to you."

The mage had been in the act of moving on to attend to her other patients, but she settled back down and raised the other eyebrow. I wondered briefly if they were independent entities, or whether all mages had athletic eyebrows, before I wrangled my brain back on task and turned to Alistair and asked him, "Were the emissaries still on the bridge having their little club meeting when you left?"

"I think so. I think they were building the cloud back up. Morrigan's rain was starting to die down," he replied, his eyes curious.

I nodded to myself. "Okay. Wynne... Remember when I told you to never, ever cause an earthquake ever again?"

"Yes?"

"I was wrong."

Her brown eyes gleamed. "Understood. I need a clear line of sight on the bridge."

"Wait, what?" Alistair looked back and forth between us. "You can't be serious. We'll be trapped! Besides... how am I supposed to explain to Arl Eamon that my friends blew up his bridge?"

"Do you have any better ideas?" I challenged.

He didn't.

"Right, then. Let's get moving." I put a hand on his shoulder and levered myself up. "Come on, Wynne. Let's go visit the catapults. I'll show you the way. I'm not good for much else at the moment, I think."

Alistair started to follow us into the castle, but I hesitated and looked up at him. "Um... This thing we're about to do... It might hit the dwarves pretty hard."

He nodded, understanding. "I'll try to warn them, get them to fall back in time." He gave me one last reluctant look, unhappy about leaving me unguarded, but finally turned and jogged off to the front.

Wynne and I climbed some stairs (not fun for me) and opened a thick wooden door leading to the mezzanine roof. The noise of the battle slammed against our ears in a physical blow. Each of the six compact catapults were in constant motion, one firing after the other in a steady, workmanlike rhythm into the packed ranks of darkspawn on the bridge, but the paragon's share of the noise came from below. Darkspawn howls, shouted orders, clashes of steel on steel, the screams of the dead and the dying on both sides. For a moment Wynne stood still as if in shock, and then a man with a hand truck came through the door behind us at a run and practically knocked her over. He kept going with barely a glance at us and deposited the crate of fresh ammunition near one of the machines before turning and trotting off to get more.

Wynne recovered her poise and moved closer to the edge of the roof, careful to stay clear of the busy crews of engineers. She squinted in the dark and frowned, planning her attack.

The Redcliffe bridge had many long, slender pylons, but the majority of its weight was supported by a single protrusion of rock sticking straight up from the lake. The emissaries were huddling behind their wall of corpses just above that rock, which made sense because the bridge there was wider and had a sort of gazebo built on it. From this angle, I could see the wisps of greenish smoke writhing away from some of the dead to snake along the bridge and join with the main body of the death fog. It was getting thicker, for sure, and the humans and dwarves were slowly giving ground. I picked out Alistair standing next to Ser Perth, their armor shimmering in the last of the rain; Alistair was gesturing vehemently but I couldn't hear him.

"I believe a moderate effort will bring that central portion down," Wynne shouted to me to be heard over the din.

"Not yet," I hollered back. I chewed on my lip, worrying for the dwarves below. Perth had accepted Alistair's argument and his knights began to push forward to bolster the dwarven line while his infantry tried to move up from behind. Cohorts of dwarven warriors attempted to tighten into blocks and fall back neatly, but the fog was beginning to lash out, and darkspawn leaped snarling out of its veil without warning, wreaking terrible havoc on the night-blind human troops. Without the dwarven legion's shield wall, the hastily trained, frightened, half-blind human infantry melted away like wax before the darkspawn's fiery assault.

"This is not working," Wynne decided. "Those poor boys are dying. I won't stand here and watch."

With that, she spread her hands out and gritted her teeth. I felt a pulse of power ripple out from her, followed by another and another, like a drumbeat. And I felt it when her power reached the stone pinnacle.

The pounding beat set up a destructive loop of vibrations inside the crystalline structure of the stone. It groaned, an ominous sound I felt more than heard. The pinnacle rippled and swayed for a few seconds, and then it shrieked in agony, tearing itself apart. Its cry lanced into my skull and drove me to my knees, wave upon wave of rending anguish from the quaking stone crashing over me.

But I'd been prepared, more or less, and braced myself for the onslaught, remembering how it had felt when Wynne used the same spell the day Zevran ambushed us. This time I didn't – quite – curl up in a fetal ball and whimper, but instead managed to prop myself up on the wall at the edge of the roof and look down at the fight. Down below, a momentary silence had fallen, the darkspawn and humans staring around them, looking for the source of the strange rumbling, while one by one the dwarves wavered and collapsed. Some cried out and clutched at their heads, others curled up and pressed their faces to the stones, a few managed to keep hold of their weapon and shield and merely fell panting to one knee. In an instant, the darkspawn's confusion would vanish and they would pounce on the easy prey.

And then a maniac roar split the air, and Oghren stampeded directly into the darkspawn mass. Insensible to pain, the berserker laid about him with his waraxe in great, sweeping arcs, cleaving through the enemy as though they were made of wet paper. The darkspawn went mad, milling around and trying to close in behind the crazed warrior. Alistair shouted to the knights and chased after Oghren to guard his back, for in his rage the dwarf gave no thought to protecting himself. Perth and his knights charged in behind him, and together they drove a wedge into the darkspawn ranks, keeping their attention and buying precious seconds for the dwarves to recover.

There was one last shattering crescendo of noise, and forty yards of the bridge simply crumbled. Darkspawn tumbled through the air to smash among its jagged pieces. Every last emissary died.

Wynne sat down abruptly. "My goodness," she said faintly. "That took rather more out of me than I expected."

Quivering aftershocks still rippled through the stone far below, sending silvery jolts of sensation up through my feet, but I could tolerate it. I pushed myself to my feet. Below me the other dwarves were doing the same. With impressive discipline, they pressed forward to follow up on the shock of Oghren's insane assault. The green-brown fog, meanwhile, had changed in the instant of the emissaries' deaths to normal white mist, and within seconds it evaporated harmlessly, revealing to the darkspawn inside the castle that they were cut off and alone. The tone of their cries changed from lustful rage to dismay and confusion.

I sat down beside Wynne with a thump, suddenly exhausted and ravenous. "I think the boys can handle it from here, don't you?"

A ghost of a smile flickered across her face. "They will have to. These old bones can only push so far. Do you think, together, we might manage to stagger someplace where there might be a hot drink?"

"And _meat_," I said fiercely. "Beef. Rare. Lots."

* * *

The sun was just coming out after three days of drizzle, and I was sitting with Zevran, Leliana and Alistair on the battlements of the outer wall, on the side that faced the village wharves. Our feet kicked in the breeze, nothing beneath us but sheer cliffs all the way to the choppy lake below. Only while out on the most inaccessible bits of architecture could we find anything resembling peace and quiet, and the castle was so desperately crowded that quiet had become highly desirable. Fortunately, Alistair remembered all sorts of interesting hiding spots he'd discovered while avoiding Isolde's wrath. This particular spot had become our favorite because it came with free entertainment.

"Oh, look, look!" Leliana exclaimed, pointing with one hand while the other cradled her lute. "That one stayed afloat for three whole seconds."

The darkspawn had been trying to learn how to swim for days. Since their method of learning was to wade straight in, still in their crappy armor, until the water closed over their dumb heads and they drowned, this process had been going slowly.

"Maybe if they had any emissaries left, they might figure it out faster, but some jerk went and killed them all," I said.

Some of the more intrepid darkspawn had discovered the fishing boats, but they were having a terrible time with the oars and raising the sails had not even occurred to them. It made sense, as they, like me, had never seen an above-ground sailing vessel before.

"See, there goes another one," Zevran remarked.

"Can't, I'm watching those four trying to figure out a rowboat," I said absently. "They're gonna tip over any second and I don't want to miss it."

"Where?" Zev leaned close and rested his cheek against mine, ostensibly to follow my line of sight.

Alistair rolled his eyes. He mumbled what was doubtless a cutting remark about shameless elves, but his mouth was full of hardtack and all that came out was a spray of dry crumbs. He coughed and spat out the rest of the crumbs, disgusted. "Maker above, but these things are dry!"

"Here." I passed him a glass jar full of milk. "Gatekeeper has a friend who has a cow. I traded him a piece of jerky for some of his milk."

"Nice." Alistair dunked the dry biscuit into the milk and waited for it to soften. His shoulders drooped a little, and he added, "They'll probably have to slaughter the poor cow in another day. We're out of meat."

"Morrigan will be back soon," I said confidently. "Aha! Down they go!"

One of the darkspawn in the rowboat stood up and turned around while holding one of the oars. Its butt end struck the head of one of its boatmates, who fell senseless overboard. The rowboat bobbed unevenly from the changing weight and the other three lost their balance, overcompensated by leaning the opposite direction, and promptly flipped the entire boat over on top of themselves. We applauded in appreciation of fine comedy.

Morrigan had flown away to find another fishing village and deliver a signed command from the Queen, commandeering all their boats to come to Redcliffe's aid, loaded with foodstuffs and barrels of water taken from far enough away to be free of the tainted blood that had poisoned the waters around the castle. She should be back soon. In fact...

"Is that a sail?" I asked, pointing.

Alistair shaded his eyes with his hand and looked, then grinned. "I think it is."

Zev whooped in delight, and Leliana's fingers spilled out a joyful song on the lute strings. But, as time ticked by and we watched the sail avidly, it became clear that it was alone. Filled with mingled disappointment and curiosity, we followed it as it came closer and eventually we could see a single man sailing it.

He stood in the prow with one foot up on the hull, the tiller roped into place and steering the little boat hard before the steady wind. Her white keel sliced through the sparkling waves at tremendous speed, the wind blew the sailor's dark hair around his face in attractive disarray, the chiseled muscles of his bare chest gleamed under their tastefully understated patch of chest hair, and his teeth flashed against his tanned skin as he smiled up at us and waved a hand in a casual greeting.

Alistair sighed deeply. "When I grow up, I want to be as cool as Riordan_._"


	75. Explanations and Apologies

Hi guys:

All my fanfiction stories are officially on indefinite hiatus. My health still has not recovered from the severe illness I had last year, and I have to budget my energy extremely conservatively. I was faced with a choice: write fanfiction, or finish my novel. I chose the novel, because otherwise it was going to take me years to finish it, since I'd have to finish all the fanfic first.

I'm really, really sorry. I feel terrible for letting all my readers down. I do still intend to finish the stories someday, but I cannot in good conscience ask you to stick around hoping for more when I don't have any idea how long it will be. Please forgive me. I never wanted to be one of those writers who strings people along and then gives up, but... well, sh*t happened.

If you're curious about what I _am_ working on, you can read sample chapters here: /lazarus

(In case Fanfiction dot net breaks that URL, here's the sanitized version: wellspringcd dot com slash lazarus.)

Thank you so much for years of joy and support. I would never have even started writing without this amazing community.

-Melanie


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